Harry Potter wizards can’t go invisible without a rare and expensive magical item, though. Unfortunately, one of the issues on the question of “only what they can physically carry”. That’s a lot of very dangerous stuff on both sides.
That said, I think it’s going to be down to 50/50 in almost every situation. If the soldier brings camouflage and a bunch of spare rations, he quite probably wins. The wizard wanders around for a while and either leaves because he gets hungry or gets shot for his trouble. Most of the “easy” ways for the wizard to win are either spells they can’t actually do, using Harry Potter spells in ways they don’t work, or likely to backfire. It’s not going to be safe at all to try digging a soldier out of hiding.
Harry Potter magic users are very weak. If they get to prepare they’d win, but if you just drop both in an arena the soldiers will dominate. Other than Dumbledore escaping Hogwarts, I think a soldier wins every fight that’s seen in the books if they replace one of the wizards involved. I mean they all stand within like 20 feet of each other and their attacks take several seconds. An M4 is effective hundreds of yards away.
The wizard is being given every possible advantage here re “prepping the battlefield” with wards and charms prior to the contest and you think this is remotely a contest? Even for an imaginary powers contest this is a silly setup.
If dumped into an actual battlefield at some distance from each other sans prep time and the solider had the latest high tech toys the wizard would have pretty good chance of getting shot or blown up at a distance. Plus, having read several of the Harry Potter books, the magic users (in general) are not really all that smart. In a lot of ways, if we’re taking the book description of that imaginary world as canon, they have sub-par common sense.
Also most of the direct, deadly magic attacks in the book seem to require line of sight or fairly direct proximity. If the solider can see the wizard before the wizard sees him he has a decent chance of killing him. If the wizard is aware of the oncoming attack the solider is likely SOL.
“Protego” would protect the wizard from all but a major airstrike, and that would be obvious enough from a distance for them to fly away from it on their broomstick, then cast a detection charm and kill the soldier. None of these are advanced spells, since the kids at Hogwarts can use them at the age of about 13 and every Wizarding child seems to go to either Hogwarts or a similar school.
All this aside, given how clueless some wizards seem to be of the Muggle world (just look at Mr. Weasley, who actually likes Muggles, and compare him to some of the nastier wizards who might consider Muggles downright unclean), we might be expecting a lot of the wizard to know what threats the Muggle Operator brings to the table, let alone how to counter them.
I’m reminded of a scene from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where a particularly nasty nigh-indestructible demon, who has been out of action since Medieval times, (cut into pieces and stored separately across the world during the Crusades) is resurrected by the season’s villains and faces off against Buffy, armed with a stolen anti-tank missile launcher.
Buffy shoulders the launcher and aims at the demon. The demon’s cohorts (the season’s villains) realize what’s about to happen and dive for cover. The demon stares Buffy down and gives her this line:
“What’s that do?”
Then he is promptly blown away, never to be seen on the show again.
EDIT: Not to say that the SOF operator is necessarily going to be any more familiar with the wizarding arts and how to deal with them.
IF the soldier has a thermal scope, the wizard is likely toast. The soldier will use his prep time to make a sniper’s nest a quarter mile or more from the wizard’s entrance point, and drop him immediately at the start of the game. Also, the soldier is entitled to roll a d20 for a chance to resist or take half damage from all spells cast at him…
And yet we’ve had quite a few interesting replies suggesting it might not be as one-sided as it first appears. Anyway its something I put together quickly and I’m neither a soldier nor a magic user, if you don’t like it fine, but I think you’re being unnecessarily dismissive not to mention borderline rude.
I did consider that but didn’t have a really good answer, which is why I made the battleground so big. But yes, its a problem.
They have to be on site according to the rules of the OP, though.
Otherwise the soldier could stay away and send in a drone which the wizard would remotely explode and then everyone would sit twiddling their fingers.
Just realised that the rule about only being able to use what you can carry to the site rules out an air strike too, unless you’re allowed to use a mobile phone to call in more things, in which case the soldier could also call in half an army with tanks, etc.
Given that little detail, the contest is designed for the soldier to fail, being as the rules intentionally hobble him by restricting the capabilities he would normally use. But we covered that up-thread, regarding how soldiers, even SOF types, are intended to operate as part of a large team with others, rather than solo agents.
Well it wasn’t intended that way, personally I would prefer the soldier to win
If you want to talk about a team or soldiers versus a team of magicians feel free, that would be interesting.
Edited to add: this thread was inspired by a ‘making of’ documentary about the 1987 Predator movie I had just watched (most testosterone on screen ever, you can get pregnant just watching it), specifically the one on one Predator VS Arnie piece at the end.
The only “limit” as I understand on the Harry Potter magical world is that it only works on humans or animals which has brought up the question, why cant a satellite find this Hogsworth place? Why doesnt it show up on radar? Considering that its supposed to be this massive area, like a large city, with air, wind, rivers, and insects and all and can have have 30,000 people attending a quidditch match yet the muggle world cannot detect it? Ok, I get it that it’s invisible to the human eye, but doesnt it show up on the infrared?
Also for all the good stuff that comes from magic if you study Hogsworth and the magical world of Harry Potter it comes up short in many areas, most of them in technology, engineering, and manufacturing. They live like its the 19th century. They have no computers or electronics at Hogsworth (they still use lanterns and candles). They dont even grow their own food (they get food by conjuring up gold then trading with the muggle world). Oh and they dont have telephones - they use magic owls to deliver messages.
Now getting back to the scenario offered one problem with the Harry Potter wizard is that alot of their magic comes from the magic wand or other magical devices. Those have to be recharged like a battery so that might be used if the soldier understands it.
So here is my scenario where the soldier wins. He comes into the scenario wearing an infrared night vision helmet. He sets up trip wires with landmines around him, something the wizard knows nothing about. He also has sound and motion detectors so he can detect the wizards presence. Once he gets a fix on the wizards position he then can use his weapons to shoot at and around him until he finds a vulnerable point, or wait until the wizard hits a tripwire, then all he has to do is knock the magic wand out of his hand and the wizard is toast.
They’d use a detection spell (used multiple times in the books by untrained wizards) and then an explosion spell (ditto). Don’t know what the range is, but it can be reasonably distant, far enough for a wizard using protego not be damaged by blowing up a drone.
Hogwarts (not Hogsworth) is just a school, not a large city; the village attached, Hogsmeade, is very small and in a remote part of Scotland The Quidditch match was a temporary site. The spells that confuse muggles when they enter an area could also apply to muggles trying to interpret radar of that area, or there could have been more specific spells cast by wizards once they realised the risk. That’s because magic works on inanimate objects too, like in the first book, for example, transforming a pencil case into various things. Wands don’t need recharging.
The level of knowledge of the soldier and the wizard would make a big difference as to who would win, but the thing is, the wizard has protego. That makes them pretty much invulnerable for at least as long as they can stay awake, which gives them plenty of time to find the soldier.
Muliple soldiers plus one wizard might be rather different, though - a lot of soldiers would get taken out but eventually they’d get him.
Clearly, whichever of the combatants is the protagonist will win such a battle to the death. On the off chance that the battle occurs in a prolog or in flashback, whichever combatant is the father/mother/lover/buddy/teacher of the protagonist will tragically lose. One other possibility, if the battle occurs as one of many early rounds of some sort of tournament and neither character is vital to the protagonist, whichever character has more elaborate backstory or characterization will win.
Usually if both those two archetypes are present in the story the wizard is more likely to be the protagonist or have more plot relevance. Thus, the wizard will likely win in the first and third scenarios and lose in the second. With no other information, I’d bet on the wizard.
I’m reminded of the classic question of who’d win in a battle versus Batman. The answer is: whichever character has their name on the cover of the comic book the battle appears in will win.
