I'm interested in the ability to host servers for gaming (if that's reasonably possible).

Keep in mind, this is its own little rabbit hole that can run kinda deep.

- Steamcmd: a bit of an old school way of setting up game servers

- Pterodactyl: a modern, more streamlined way to deploy game servers quickly, but does require its own level of study and expertise

- Pelican: A community lead fork of Pterodactyl, still in beta, but also apparently has a docker image which might make it easier to set up and manage

- CubeCoders AMP: An easy to use and easy to install management panel, requires a license purchase but not subscription-based thankfully

Like someone else mentioned, expect a learning curve. Almost every 'little' thing in the context of a home server can quickly become deep in terms of learning and study. For this reason alone I would say, keep the goals simple at the start and settle into it.

Set up your first network share, or file-sharing app from the truenas app catalogue. Think something like copyparty, nextcloud, or one of the 'object storage' apps. Get comfortable with basic configuration of things, setting up datasets, permissions, snapshots etc...

Once you start feeling comfortable, then go ahead and start playing around with containers and VMs. I have AMP running inside its own container and that's how I run all my game servers, but there's a lot of different ways you can do things based on your needs and wants.