Serious question, I don’t mean to offend (at least not yet ;) ) - do you only ever play DnD? Because this community is called RPGmemes and I rarely (if ever) see anything but DnD.
Personally, the game I run the most is Shadowrun. Managed to transition my DnD group to Pathfinder 2e and it’s great. Pathfinder is DnD but so much better.
My group plays 3.5e and I’ve become That Guy that talks about Pathfinder every session to exactly zero avail 🥲
Classic Pathfinder basically is 3.5e, so I would hope that they would want to switch just to get away from Hasbro. Pathfinder 2e is basically a good version of what D&D5e wants to be, but they didn’t test out the rules well enough to do. It’s fairly simple and easy, without tons of contradictions. D&D3.5 and Pathfinder are great too though, but most modern TTRPG players want the simplicity of the modern systems.
Personally, I also like genericizing D&D.
It’s a shorthand for folks outside or new to the hobby, it skips a hurdle to talk to people about other RPGs with those people, and it weakens the brand identity. Considering how much D&D has coasted on brand identity as the game suffered, I’m all for that.
I’m less likely to do it places like here, because it causes more confusion, but still. It’s fun to say, “Pathfinder is a great way to play D&D.” :P
I prefer TTRPG because it doesn’t give free advertising to Hasbro. Even if most people know what you mean, someone googling D&D ends up at Hasbro’s product.
Swapping my own group to PF2e and we’ve all played other systems (lancer, sw saga, vtm, cyberpunk, kids on bikes, etc). I do think if a meme says something different than DnD (using it as a generic term for TTRPG) you’ll get more people commenting on the system rather than relating to the meme (like if this said Traveler there’d be more comments about never played Traveler or if it said PF2e comments would be more about the system war).
