EVE New Citizens Q&A

RvB is much more friendly if you want your PvP sort of compartmentalized and separated from the rest of your game experience in a very definite fashion. People that start stuff outside the designated area get ejected from the corporation, and in general things are... arranged, is the closest word I can think of, though it doesn't quite fit. Maybe "selectable". Think of the "battleground" style instanced stuff in other games, the BGs in WoW, the Huttball in ToR, the little instanced war-grounds in WAR.

FW is more free-form and does much more to change the character of the game in general. The factions are built into the game itself, so there's no one enforcing "fair" play, and people can jump you in high-sec without CONCORD intervening or getting in any kind of trouble, really (well, the faction fleets, but they're mosquitoes on tranquilizers). Additionally, you can easily pay your replacement bills from FW alone, so it can more easily take over your entire game life. But the objectives out in the war area are in the form of small instances with choked warp-gates that give greater rewards to fewer people capping or defending them, sort of analogous to WoW's arenas. So there's a broader scope to FW, but also smaller actual encounters, typically.

If you've never fired an imaginary bullet at another player's pixels in your life, I would start with RvB. If you're reasonably familiar with small-scale tactical games and/or don't worry to much about preserving all your precious, precious ships then FW is probably better.

(Because the primary lesson of RvB is to stop worrying about ship losses, so if you've already got that bit down there's not much to gain from it.)

LOL blame Damar Rocarion for that one.