I was thinking of making a tutorial for players so that newcomers can understand how the game works, and I want it to be a one time thing that happens when the player joins for the first time.
From what I’ve heard so far though, I will have to use the Datastores Service in order to do so. But I don’t want to make a Datastore for such a simple thing and I want to know if there are other ways to make the tutorial happen only once.
It’s not possible to know if the player played the game before or not without using datastores, as roblox doesn’t give any indication wether not the player is new and you can’t save values without datastores.
Hope this helps, if you need any further help please feel free to ask!
Sincerely,
oski3d1
Or give them a ‘completed the tutorial’ badge when they finish it.
When players join check to see if they’ve got the badge. If not, play the tutorial.
And if they never have the badge because they did not complete it, the never ever ever get to play the game! 
what if players want to replay the tutorial though?
You can remove the badge from your inventory. But in general, it is better to use DataStore.
It is not always the best option to use DataStores for this, in my opinion. Some games do not use data stores at all, so it wouldn’t make sense to set up a datastore just for the tutorial. A badge can serve this purpose and is also very quick to set up. Though, if the player may need to redo the tutorial later on in the game when they reset their data, for example, you will have to use a DataStore or somehow find another method of saving and loading data per player.
If your game does not rely on saving data, then yeah you can technically use badges as a flag. There are other ways like using HttpService, but that would setting up your own (psuedo) database that you might as well use DataStoreService for it.
Good idea actually. And if the player wants to replay the tutorial I could simply just make it a button that teleports them back to the tutorial place.
My game will eventually use datastores but I want to avoid it as I have a limited understanding of how they work, and I heard data can get lost easily and there is a limit to how much datastores my game can use at a time.
You could also just do a simple loading screen so when the player loads in they’d have options for ‘watch tutorial’ or ‘play game’.