Quote Originally Posted by Liquor Box View Post
That's only true because you are taking it that the concepts from DnD to trump those from the real world.

For example, if the rule (I use the word rule so we can deal with this encounter in game terms) for nuclear weapons was "kills all creatures in its area of effect" and the wizard's spell said "avoids all damage from non-magical sources", there is a contradiction. I think most people here are coming from the assumption that the DnD rule prevails. I know that there are a myriad of ways people are saying the wizard could avoid attacks, but for most of those there is an inherent assumption that a DnD rule prevails over the ways things work in the real world (all of which could be re-conceptualised as rules).
That requires doing magical things with technology to be possible; an assumption unsupported by the lack of such effects in the technological side of the various RPG systems or indeed, the lack of a known planar cosmology in real world as we know it as well as non-magical d20 variants. Chances are magic can do things that are impossible without it and thus the Chinese Army will, no matter how advanced, have to face an adversary with capabilities they can never match. Indeed, that tends to be the very definition of magic; producing matter/energy out of thin air, moving things instantaneously, creating worlds, ending worlds, resurrecting the dead, travelling back in time, et cetera. D&D magic at least doesn't seem to be superadvanced technology given all it takes is some arcane handwaving, bat guano and few choice words to shatter conservation of energy.

Anyways, if codifying things as rules, DnD has the rule of specific trumping general. That's how all immunities work. So if we have a rule "nukes kill everything" and another rule "doesn't die", "doesn't die" trumps the "kill everything" since "kill everything" is a generic effect that tries to do precisely what the immunity protects from; this applies regardless what system which rule comes from. Though this is a rather strange way to codify nukes: there are plenty of known nuclear survivors after all (of course not at the exact ground zero and these are from small oldschool fission bombs, not modern fusion bombs). Nukes just cause intense heat and extreme radiation; vast majority of the fatalities are due to heat. Lethal radiation overdose is a minor factor. If we have a Wizard who is utterly immune to heat, bringing out Radiation would be relevant but chances are radiation falls under some type of actual damage or attribute damage and is thus irrelevant with magical protections that address those generic categories


However, I posit that's all irrelevant too. As long as the Wizard's magic functions, I posit we can solve this in favor of the Wizard in any number of ways without a single shot being fired (at the real Wizard; shots are fired constantly in the real world so that probably can't be prevented in the short term). Being able to talk with deities, gate in angels, travel planes, teleport, become incorporeal, astrally project, resurrect, produce self-replicating undead, see the future, rewrite minds, etc. without needing any real equipment to speak of is all just on such a different level of power compared to anything our world has access to at the present that it is a non-contest. Like, even other similarly empowered creatures have trouble harming each other; let alone anyone unable to cast Disjunction.

Hell, even assuming it being physically possible to access other planes of existence...how long would it take for the world's best scientists to figure out how to access them? Without a real place to start (they probably don't have convenient deities to ask), pretty damn long I wager. 5 years? 10 years? Longer? We don't exactly have much for the physicists to go off; they'd have to create something from scratch. And then go from that to actually building usable technology to that end and then building scanners to actually locate extraplanar creatures and then to find this one particular creature on some plane... I don't see it happening in the time it takes for a Wizard to learn what he wishes to learn and then her projections, planar bound/gated fiends and company to dominate everybody relevant and bring about a nuclear apocalypse, shadowcalypse, wightocalypse, global flood, barren Earth or whatever (though I still don't get why she'd do that).