If they don't want to play it, running it isn't gonna be that fun. That's why I haven't ran the Shadowrun campaign I made for my group. Nobody other than my sister wants to play SR. :/
My players love Pathfinder, but after running a 1-20 campaign for years I needed a break from it. So far this year we've played Apocalypse Frame, Delta Green, and Troika. It's been a blast trying out different systems and settings, had a few surprises about how much we liked or didn't like different mechanics.
My current group of players has only played Starfinder, Stars without Number, Cities without Number, Vampire the Masquerade (V5), and some one-shot games like Quiet Year.
I don't want to run or play D&D, so I don't. If needed, we could always hang out without playing a game.
D&D and Pathfinder are like Baseball and Softball, maybe. But going from D&D to Fate or PbtA is like changing to football or fencing. It's very different. Trying to get someone who's playing Baseball to take up soccer is tricky. D&D is baseball. Pathfinder is softball. Easier transition.
Pathfinder is close enough to D&D that I've had success converting people to it because fuck Wizards of the Coast and their recurring attempts to gouge everyone with mandatory subscriptions and predatory licensing rackets.
Also Pathfinder's setting is downright more creative because they don't keep digging deeper into that boring old "what if underdark and illithids... AGAIN?" well.
I haven't played Pathfinder 2e but my understanding is it had a lot more choices at the turn level and character build level. that's good if you want that, but I think for a lot of people the shallowness of 5e is a plus. There are other games that would also be a good fit if you're not looking for deep tactics or builds, though.
I was once explaining a rules lite system I wanted to try to someone, and he kept complaining about how difficult it would be for him to learn a new system. I had to point out that I had already fully explained the rules while we were talking, and we weren't even talking long.
I think some people just think every system is as complex as D&D.
Some people never really learned DND either, but kind of get carried along by the group. I feel like you could switch out systems on those people and they wouldn't do any worse.
But I get it. Some people are more casual. Some people have executive dysfunction. My current strategy is to find people who want to play what I want to play, and it's working okay. Still makes me a little sad that DND is so mega popular, but okay.
On the other hand, DMing also involves a lot of homework, so it's completely understandable that someone might want to switch to doing homework for a different subject on occasion.
The last group I was with ran mostly DND 5e. However, our DM needed a break, and another player took up the reigns for a Star Wars Table Top.
It was not serious. Homebrew and the rule of cool made it a blast - Think Guardians of the Galaxy comedy in a Star Wars wrapper.
The DM for that set goal posts. Like around a certain level, force sensitive classes would get their first light saber.
My character was a bounty hunter who finally got his Mandalorian armor where I could customize "components" like a hand mounted flame thrower, or a shoulder cannon, or what the fuck ever. We spent more time dissecting statistics to get it balanced than anything thematic.
Totally home brewed in that system.
I think that was my best table top experience, and I'm an old school DND nerd. I feel like some days I can barely do my job, but I can quote how THAC0 works on a whim.
I don't understand statistics unless dice are involved, and no that does not extend to gambling dice games. Utterly useless, but I can go into an ADHD hyper focus on anything that is not actually beneficial to my life in a tangible way, lol.
Easy enough that I had to read your comment a few times to read it with the non-aggro tone you intended lol
The hard part is when there's a community built around a game system with its own traditions and rituals. That's never in the books. This is only an issue with bigger systems like V:tM, Pathfinder, and Shadowrun, but you just need to learn to play them from other people just like you learned to play D&D.
After running some Dungeon World I have little interest in ever playing or running d&d again. It's so much better for organic storytelling, and combat is much less of a slog.