eybeams
Of course, by the standard you put forth, comic books and, er, bacon both compete with RPGs. People make choices between many things because they only have so much money. It does not necessarily follow that these things are in any meaningful competition with each other.
Of course, you could talk about how other media competes with RPGs, and the funny thing is, of course, that you must if claiming that the top few systems are in meaningful competition. What I mean is that you can argue that D&D competes with WoW at least as much as it does with the World of Darkness.
The trouble is that discussion on this scale is not actually the same as talking about whether major *roleplaying* games compete with each other. They don't. At least, they don't compete with each other much more significantly than with other media. As I noted (in what I actually wrote, mind. I have no idea what you *read*), there are exceptions where the leading systems do compete, such as in genre books. All the same, people don't get GURPS just because they want to replicate the D&D experience, and claiming that they do is self-evidently shallow analysis. This is true even though the system has a supported fantasy setting.
Plus, of course, there are second and third tier systems that want a slice of what WoD or whatever has, but, as what I wrote made abundantly clear, I wasn't talking about them.
