Kaijus and Handling Big McFuckenLargenHuge Monsters in D&D

[Prak]

Lets say you want to represent Godzilla in D&D. Like, not just the five story tall in spirit version, but actually Godzilla, who ranges from 164 to 330 feet tall across his entire filmography.

And, it's not just a problem of the Tarrasque literally being smaller and less capable than fucking Minya, it's also a problem of D&D physical attacks topping out at ridiculously small amounts. Like, no, honestly, I don't want to roll 20 dice for every fucking claw attack, but, like, even if you create a new size category, and increase the tarrasque to it, even rolling 3d6 for Godzilla's claw attack, against a single target, is fucking insulting. If you want your Colossal+Tarrasque to smash a building, you're looking at an average of four claw attacks for it to break down a single masonry wall. And Satan help him if that wall is reinforced, in which case it will take eight. And technically, that's for, like, a 5x5' section, right?

Like... if the Pacific Rim Kaiju operated on D&D stats, The Wall would have actually fucking worked because you could just shoot the damned things with conventional weapons in the time it took them to wreck a small section of your modern steel and concrete wall.

Ok, so my point.

If you want to put Godzilla-esque monsters in your campaign, it's because you want to invoke the awe and power of these creatures. And description is all well and good, but if Godzilla goes from effortlessly wrecking towers in the description to lucky 3rd level barbarians being able to withstand a claw attack in combat.... that awe and power disappear.

So. One "solution" that comes to mind is throwing your players some "Make my monstersChampions GROW!!!!" phlebotinum as a sort of narrative sleight of hand justification for why they take a few d6 of damage from Godzilla when he hits them. Personally, I find that pretty underwhelming. I suppose it's better than throwing them giant golem mechs that completely replace their abilities. Unless "Giant Golem Mechs that mimic your abilities!" is your phlebotinum.

But aside from that, if you want to let your players fight against kaiju, and have at least some of the dramatic impact of kaiju that likely inspired you to do so, how do you do that? Aside from having a collection of stages and planned events that simulate a kaiju rampage and some non-combat means of defeating it.

[angelfromanotherpin]

My version was to have the Kaiju be so ridicuhuge you could have a level-appropriate dungeon crawl inside it.

Should I shoot for epic right off the bat?

Yes, absolutely.



I'm running a Tome game, and in the first session two kingdoms neighboring where the PCs live were destroyed by a cricket the size of a mountain that eats the fertility out of soil. All the higher-level heroes in the vicinity either fled or died fighting the cricket, but the PCs were recruited to enter the Cricket through a hidden flaw in its armor and rampage around inside it fighting off its enormous immune system and parasites. Which it turns out is a lot like running through a dungeon with challenges of CRs between 2 and 5.

So the challenge is no more than the players are used to, but the trappings of the adventure are on a much bigger scale than they're used to dealing with, or ever expected to be at 3rd level. And they love it.

[deaddmwalking]

So the first thing that D&D needed for larger creatures was automatic 'area attacks'. When a giant giant swings his really giant club, he shouldn't just hit one person. He should hit everyone that's in a certain area. Hard!

Godzilla should be able to hit multiple sections of wall with a single hit. The base dice of damage aren't super-important, though, because of the bonus from STR. Like 3d6+48 isn't much different from 6d6+48, but you're free to scale the damage as you like.

The other thing that really big monsters need is different 'areas'. You might have a reasonable chance of disabling Godzilla's tail, but until you do that, he's basically unbeatable. Arcade games do things like that all the time. As long as you use descriptive language and it is clear what is happening, you should be fine. Disabling his flame/lightning attack is something you can do and it is somewhat easier than killing him outright.

Turning it into a dungeon is cool, but not really thematically appropriate in this case.

It's also absolutely fine to give it DR that makes normal weapon attacks pointless. Figuring out how to lure it into an area with giant siege weapons as the only way to stop it is fine - basically you're building an adventure around the creature, so having the PCs figure out a number of possible solutions is fine. D&D isn't great with having narrative survivalist abilities, but in a movie, you know the PCs would be stomped into the mud but survive and would learn about the futility of conventional attacks.

[angelfromanotherpin]

I approve of modeling particularly large creatures by stapling gargantuan creatures together and fluffing them as one creature. I don't know if that gets you to proper Kaiju scale in a reasonable way, but I think it's the best you can do within the 3.x structure.

[FatR]

There is an inherent problem with DnD math starting on "basically normal mortals" scale, while one of the main draws of the game is that eventually you proceed to fight a kitchen sink of ridiculous creatures from all across the fantasy, and the authors having no agreement of how exactly ridiculous the endgame should be.

That said, there can be workaround. For example, in my own heartbreaker the tarrasque has, among others, the following abilities:

Devastator (Ex): Damage of a tarrasque’s attacks against unattended inanimate objects, structures, and vehicles of greater size than Large is multiplied by 10, and he gets a +10 bonus on Strength checks made to break and destroy something.
Massive Sweep (Ex): A tarrasque is so vast, that his normal claw sweeps hit a Small area.

The former means that he can punch through four castle walls stacked together or bite any ship I've bothered to stat so far in half, the latter that he can hit squads of a few dozens of mooks or catch a couple heroes, presumably zapping around at superspeed by this point, with a single try.

[brized]

Godzilla's top speed is 300mph (ditto with the faster kaiju from Pacific Rim), so 2640 feet per 6 seconds. Walking speed is probably like 660 feet per 6 seconds. For PCs fighting kaiju, in a straight combat you need at least one scaled-up grid to at least 100x so you can depict a kaiju-scale battlefield without needing an absurdly large table, battlemat, and minis.

Kaiju-scale DR+resists should be roughly 100 and increase in increments of 10. Ditto for damage bonuses, so two equally-sized monsters can just cancel out their size-based damage and resists. AoE from attacks should be huge as well, so on a 100x grid, it will look like a normal AoE for a character on a normal scale grid, but to characters on a normal grid the effect would be massive.

Switching from imperial to metric would make all this scaling easier!

For terrain and objects like buildings, it may again make sense to scale bonuses so that a kaiju hitting something scaled to it just cancels out the size bonuses. As long as you can quickly estimate whether an object would take one hit, a full round of hits, or multiple rounds of hits to destroy, that would probably be enough to adjudicate a combat on the fly and not rely on pre-planned events.


Beyond that it's going to depend on what theme your group is going for:

• Giant Mecha - PCs each pilot their own mecha. See Pacific Rim, Evangelion.
  Voltron - PCs join together to make a humongous mecha. See Voltron, Power Rangers.
  Superheroes - PCs face the kaiju directly. See planetary and cosmic-tier superheroes (Thor, Nova, Superman, Green Lantern, etc.)
  Divine Power - Go on a quest that allows you to grow to almost-kaiju size temporarily. See God of War.
  Summon/befriend other Kaiju - Fight the kaiju indirectly. See Godzilla vs. Mothra etc.
  Lay a Trap - Lure the kaiju into a trap using forces of nature (volcano, lightning, hurricane, etc.). See Ghostbusters vs. Cthulu.
  ???

[Prak]

Yeah, I literally just did the math, and the more recent Godzillas would need a literally 5'6" tall mini, and even the early Showa'Zilla would need a 40" tall mini.

I suppose if we stick to metric for ease, that means you could just do a fast conversion of "1cm=1m" for your scale, meaning Godzilla's mini is 50cm, or about 20", tall, and your hero minis are 1.5cm, or about .6". Unless you give them phlebotinum that sizes them up.

I happened to already be thinking about changing figure scale so PCs can use D&D scale Large minis, just because I recently got some and the detail is really nice compared to medium minis. With some quick math... a 3" tall mini, such as my Reaper female "Ruler of Hell" mini I have right next to me, works as a 24 ft/7m tall character in 1cm:1m scale....

[OgreBattle]

I figure it’s like handling a god, you do things more based on an organization than exact action economy and personal spell limits

[FatR]

You more or less have to abandon grid measured in feet in meters once you have stuff like superspeed, teleport spam and tactical nukes on demand, or for that matter, breath-strafing dragons the size of a small castle, and what high-level fantasy on screen today doesn't have one or more of those? Ideally a version of DnD geared towards "high-level wizard" rather than "low-level fighter" play should have abstracted movement.

As about armies and organizations in play against kaijus, don't they get BTFO all the time in kaiju movies, and monsters only typically lose to plot devices or other monsters?

[Thaluikhain]

As about armies and organizations in play against kaijus, don't they get BTFO all the time in kaiju movies, and monsters only typically lose to plot devices or other monsters?

Yeah, was thinking, very rare for something to actually fight something like that conventionally and get anywhere. King Kong being an exception.

Or, perhaps, Epic 40k.