And because the DND spells themselves just call them gems, and nothing in the specific setting I used ever had mad, something like magical mass scale 3d printing.
(Also the fact that the gems have to have a set cost, gets real fucking weird real fast with economics and magical production)
If anything, I think that makes it less likely they'd care about mines? I mean, if you're an even moderately powerful wizard, why would you bother with a traditional mine, and miners you have to pay, when you could just summon an earth elemental or something that can get you whatever precious gems you might want? Alternatively, if you're skilled in planar travel, you can just go somewhere like the plane of earth or the plane of gems and get unlimited quantities of whatever you need.
Also, yeah, economics in D&D make no sense and fundamentally do not work, but that's just another point in favor of not taking the designer's word about demographics as gospel.
Given that their is probably under 20 even mid level mages (95% of all mages are below level 6) and most people would not be anywhere near as optomized as PC's I wouldn't worry about it as much, and some mages not being hit by the material componet thing as much isn't an issue given that many still would be. Also given this is a singular country most splat books, races and feats are off the table. Also most people are NPC classes not PC classes which further reduces the variety.
I'd like you to keep in mind, the vast majority of the people in DnD are one house cat scartch away from dying, literally.
A) The cannon demographics make no sense and do not line up with the stories we see. They're not worth using as a baseline.
B) Fantasy worlds aren't about winning via quantity. Armies are, at best, meant for holding territory or, maybe, local pest control. The actually important stuff gets done by a small handful of exceptionally powerful individuals. So, if you're contention is there are 20 somewhat powerful wizards, what you are saying is they have 19 more than they need to cause problems.
If I don't define the magic setting, there is no B.
I'm not putting the B in.
Therefore I am making no argument about B.
In fact you the check list does not need to include anything about B at all.
You are very explicitly making arguments and statements about which worlds you think would win, not objective observations. That you want to term them as tools does not change the fact that they are arguments.
WW2 nukes were not used as a final response they were used as the first response to save lives (on one side) once they could be.
In that mind set a day 1 full scale nuclear anihlation of the newly appeared fantasy nation is fitting, why should we send our infantry to die?
That is a very ahistorical take and ignores pretty much everything else that happened in that theater, both before and after the bombings.
If you wish to show me a fantasy nation that can withstand roughly 4000 nuclear weapon and thousands of other ICBMs with no warning and no counter and then still win the war go ahead and do so. (And if they can, that is it's own counter anyway)
By the same token, I could say there's no way a modern nation could survive the very sky
literally falling on them as a horizon spanning spider crawls through a crack in reality and drives every mortal that witnesses it insane. (No, the scene I'm describing did not involve a god. It was a single Duke who promptly got murdered by the revolution he was trying to suppress.) Or how about a constant rain of meteors turning the skies read as they bombard major cities (and no, the US could not easily swat them out of the sky)? Maybe something more classic? A rift opening up in the sky and a city sized column of fire and/or magma pouring down on, well, a city?
Obviously, the US can't survive that kind of assault and there's basically nothing they could do to meaningfully mitigate it, so clearly that means the US loses? Of course, none of that touches on the opposing nations ability to stop nukes after they're in flight, but that's kind of the point: your binary "tools" aren't particularly good tools.
If it's a dimensional portal scenario, then I would figure that modern forces would be more willing to use nukes, as all of the damage and fallout would be contained on the other side and not damage their own Earth. But of course that means they would first have to transport the components for the missiles and launchers through the portal and then assemble them on the other side, which kind of precludes an immediate first strike.
Apparently, they're both on the same world and the magical nation just appeared there. So ... yeah. Not sure how that scenario is supposed to work.
Except, somewhat ironically, Mundus Magicus from Negima could work, since they're in a sort-of parallel layer of the world and could theoretically be forced back onto the underlying one. Under those conditions, I'd give the contest to Mundus Magicus, fairly handily, since they have both insanely powerful individuals and functional armies with better magi-tech gear then the US could field. This remains true even if you take the
truly broken stuff off the field, like Keys of the Life Maker or Fate Avernus.
It might be possible to drill underground and place shaped charge nuclear warheads if they know where to dig, though.
Maybe, but I'm not sure how useful that would be. Sure, the nuke would be pretty destructive, in its immediate vicinity, but there's also going to be a lot more
stuff in the way to soak up the blast and any radiation. You're also not going to get any convection or weather patterns making the results worse. Overall, I suspect you'd have to drill pretty close to something sensitive in order for the nuke to be effective and that sounds like an invitation for the Drow to steal your nuke.
