Watching the movie today and I was wondering what these 2 titans stats would be in AD+D or D+D settings. If anyone has come across these I would be interested in seeing them. Like the old Diety's and Demigods book had stats for Elric, King Arthur, Thor, Fafhred and the Grey Mouser etc...
Godzilla is 300' tall (+/-, depending which version you are watching), and has radioactive breath. He knocks down 20th-21st century sky scrapers with his tail by accident, melts tanks made of inches-thick steel, capsizes battleships and aircraft carriers, and takes hits from jet fighter planes without flinching. He would be so far beyond the scope of what exists in D&D, that I don't think it would be useful to model him mechanically. If you tried to make him "beatable" by giving him stats, say, equivalent to something like Tiamat, you'd have a statblock, but it wouldn't approach what the Godzilla in the movies can actually do. If you tried to make him true to the movies, the statblock would be prohibitive. Nothing in D&D can touch him other than (maybe) a Wish... but Godzilla's plot armor would probably prevent that as well.
(Also they kind of tried that in Godzilla vs. King Gidoroah by going back in time and making Godzilla never get into the radiation accident that created him, and it didn't work -- he came back bigger and stronger than ever by feeding off of the radiation in other places under the sea... so you can't even Wish there was never a Godzilla... he is a force of nature that cannot be stopped.)
I mean in terms of stats... the stat blocks can't even cover it. If a measly Tarrasque, which is only 70' long and 50' high and would barely come up to Godzilla's thigh, has 30 STR, how much more would Godzilla have? (But you can't go over 30, so there's one problem.) Godzilla would probably have a 30 AC, and a couple hundred hit dice, for thousands of hp. And his radiation breath would be insane... 1,000+ foot cone, 100' wide, and probably doing , I dunno, 50d8 or something of damage? What amount would be capable of melting tanks or armored naval vessels? He'd probably also be completely immune to most weapon types, even magic ones, just based on their size. (What good are arrows, even +3 arrows, going to do against Godzilla's hide?)
Old school Kong you could do (the 1930s one who was only 20' high) no problem. Godzilla-vs-Kong though, is as big and impossible as Godzilla... Again, I don't see how you could realistically make a stat block that adequately reflect the sheer size of and power of a Kaiju, given the scale of what else has been made in D&D already that is much tinier and weaker (Ancient dragons, TIamat, etc).
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
The whole point of Godzilla is that he's beyond human comprehension. He embodies the unimaginable power of nuclear destruction, created by the one country that suffered two nuclear bombs on civilian cities and had a collective nightmare about that for decades. The 2014 and 2019 movies in particular center around the concept that the threats humanity faces in them can't be dealt with by us - only Godzilla is strong enough for that. You can make a Godzilla-like flightless dragon monster at the extreme edge of what D&D allows, but that would essentially disregard what Godzilla is supposed to be.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
I’ve already been considering kaiju and mechs (for plot related reasons, honest) and one idea I’ve had (but haven’t fully fleshed out yet mechanically) would be that the larger creatures were mostly fighting each other and performing in terms of regular stats, whilst any damage, spells, etc done by the party to them was divided by 10.
The kaiju and giant mechs would still have a lot of hp, but it means that a lot of the focus would switch to them attacking each other and dealing damage in their “regular” hits against each other, rather than the party taking down the larger creature directly.
Damage by those creatures onto PCs, or how AoEs, etc work on that scale haven’t been considered yet though.
I want to say AD&D's Legend and Lore had stats for Godzilla and King Kong under different names. I want to say there was a monster called I think a Gargantuan, and the stat block and entry allowed for a giant ape, a giant reptilian, and a giant insect. I want to say things like atomic flame were even assigned. I'm talking about a 30+ year old memory which consisted of me seeing them in a friends book and thinking "cool". Anyway it was clearly an effort by TSR to stat in Godzilla and King Kong into game terms while avoiding nasty letters from Toho and whoever owned King Kong at the time. IIRC the stats were absurd.
BW is right in that King Kong would need an "adaptable size to narrative needs" feature to vary from 20' to 20 stories, to whatever size he was in the Godzilla throw downs.
Godzilla basically would be unkillable. He rampages until he accomplishes his objective or gets bored and wanders away (I want to say rampaging till decides to go elsewhere was a trait noted in Legends and Lore). If it was found somehow to overload Godzilla to make him explode, well there was the Mothra save in a recent movie but in the 90s? Toho run, Godzilla was smart enough to have his son(?) Baby Godzilla in the blast radius so that when Godzilla did explode, when the dust cleared there was Late Adolescent Godzilla picking up the mantle as the credits rolled.
I'm not saying Godzilla is bigger than Dungeons and Dragons, though he sort of is. Earlier iteration of the big G would be problematic as its nature is very much tied to nuclear power, which isn't a thing in most D&D worlds. However, the notion that Godzilla "charges" itself from some not fully understood energy field form the earth makes it a little more playable in a D&D space.
I'd only use Godzilla the way the Leviathan was used in the Book of Job, to emphasize the point that no matter how great the humanoid party thinks they are there are (arguably literal) forces of nature they simply can't fathom, let alone contend with.
I have thought about Godzilla showing up in Avernus, after which all the parties involved in and ancillary to the Blood War actually take a pause and reflect on their excesses.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
I would run them the way I'd run a hurricane or earthquake. They'd be an environmental hazard, and the goal would be to get to a safe distance before you get crushed/incinerated.
I would potentially let a high level party tip the scales between a close match, in the same way a decisive battle in a larger war might turn the tides.
The whole point of Godzilla is that he's beyond human comprehension. He embodies the unimaginable power of nuclear destruction, created by the one country that suffered two nuclear bombs on civilian cities and had a collective nightmare about that for decades.
This. It's a little like the once-in-a-while conversations about Cthulhu you see. Which isn't a coincidence, I don't think. I think you could probably draw a straight line between Lovecraft and Ray Harryhausen and the guys who made Godzilla.
My point is: heroic fantasy is entirely framed around the notion that the actions of heroes matter. Godzilla reframes that completely. The modern Universal ones do so explicitly for laughs.
You could probably find a system that accommodates Gamera vs Gyaos, but D&D's dice only go to 20, y'know?
The whole point of Godzilla is that he's beyond human comprehension. He embodies the unimaginable power of nuclear destruction, created by the one country that suffered two nuclear bombs on civilian cities and had a collective nightmare about that for decades.
This. It's a little like the once-in-a-while conversations about Cthulhu you see. Which isn't a coincidence, I don't think. I think you could probably draw a straight line between Lovecraft and Ray Harryhausen and the guys who made Godzilla.
My point is: heroic fantasy is entirely framed around the notion that the actions of heroes matter. Godzilla reframes that completely. The modern Universal ones do so explicitly for laughs.
You could probably find a system that accommodates Gamera vs Gyaos, but D&D's dice only go to 20, y'know?
I'm pretty sure Legends and Lore had stats for the Cthulhu mythos too, I think that's what got it slapped hard with a cease and desist if not full blown lawsuit from, maybe Chaosism possibly in league with the Lovecraft estate, and Legends and Lore consequently is harder to find in the used/collectors market.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Yeah, it did. I think they also changed the name from Deities and Demigods because of satanic panic, too (weirdly, I never heard about Moorcock or Lieber giving them any static, even though I would argue that TSR was working their streetcorner more than Lovecraft/Derleth et al)
Actually, 1e might have the right approach for Godzilla with everyone making a save vs insta-death every turn they spend within a 300m radius, whether or not they're engaged in combat.
You could probably stat them out in 3.5e. Godzilla is around 300' so call it 125,000x human strength, which is about 2^17, though being Colossal gave x16 so you only need 2^13, so he's Str 75 (base 10, and x2 strength = +5). Other abilities presumably on similar scale.
I thought they were different books (Deities and Demigods and Legends and Lore) but don't really remember. Moorcock I think didn't care, or at least thought the exposure would get more readers. I'm pretty sure there were Elric and Hawkmoon licensed RPGs in the 80s and I doubt anyone went after TSR then either. Tolkien's estate was notorious for protecting it's IP. Chaosism probably felt threatened with Cthulhu showing up in D&D and probably was irked having jumped through rights hoops for its games with the Lovecraft estate so it's not surprising they asserted their rights.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Apparently, the 1981 printing dropped the Cthulhu stuff and the 1985 printing initiated the name change.
I should go through my old boxes and see which of these I have. Not that it'd have any resale value. It probably has all kinds of ballpoint scribblings about my grade school thoughts on Stormbringer.
I think several people above have it right - Godzilla is akin to a force of nature. It's like saying you want to stat out the weather, or the rotation of the earth. He just operates on a scale so far beyond anything D&D was designed to depict that any attempt to do so would be incapable of truly capturing his nature.
Just think about his size and speed. All he has to do is walk and every step would take him completely out of range of all weapons, all attempts to dash to follow him, etc. It'd be like ants trying to keep up with a human. In fact this conversation kind of reminds me of the conversation between Nick Fury and Loki in the opening scene of Avengers, about how ants can't quarrel with a boot.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
I'd only use Godzilla the way the Leviathan was used in the Book of Job, to emphasize the point that no matter how great the humanoid party thinks they are there are (arguably literal) forces of nature they simply can't fathom, let alone contend with.
I have thought about Godzilla showing up in Avernus, after which all the parties involved in and ancillary to the Blood War actually take a pause and reflect on their excesses.
I love this. If you saw the recent one, there's a genuinely beautiful piece of movie-making where a certain giant monster (no spoilers) explodes a plane at an airport. As a dolly pans from left to right, you see the humans in the terminal reacting to what they witness. So: *scream* GIANT MONSTER!!! *scream* EXPLODING PLANE!!! *scream* THAT PLANE IS EXPLODING ANOTHER PLANE!!! *scream*
And then from the right side of the screen, a certain other giant monster's (no spoilers) foot comes down and all the humans go dead silent in dreadful awe!
If I ever have any cause or the nerve to write up an "Asia" to go with my main continent's "Europe," I've decided my Great Wall is going to be along the ocean, AND NO ONE WILL EVER TALK ABOUT WHY!
I think several people above have it right - Godzilla is akin to a force of nature. It's like saying you want to stat out the weather, or the rotation of the earth.
So basically he operates on the level of 8th to 9th level spells.
I think several people above have it right - Godzilla is akin to a force of nature. It's like saying you want to stat out the weather, or the rotation of the earth.
So basically he operates on the level of 8th to 9th level spells.
More like 10th level. You can't even Wish that guy away.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Apparently, the 1981 printing dropped the Cthulhu stuff and the 1985 printing initiated the name change.
I should go through my old boxes and see which of these I have. Not that it'd have any resale value. It probably has all kinds of ballpoint scribblings about my grade school thoughts on Stormbringer.
Which is funny, because all of Lovecraft's stuff was public domain by then.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
Which is funny, because all of Lovecraft's stuff was public domain by then.
That's actually unknown even now (all the pre-1926 stuff is definitely public domain by now, the rest could in theory be protected but probably isn't), but TSR in 1981 probably didn't want to get into a possibly expensive legal fight over the issue.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
Watching the movie today and I was wondering what these 2 titans stats would be in AD+D or D+D settings. If anyone has come across these I would be interested in seeing them. Like the old Diety's and Demigods book had stats for Elric, King Arthur, Thor, Fafhred and the Grey Mouser etc...
Godzilla is 300' tall (+/-, depending which version you are watching), and has radioactive breath. He knocks down 20th-21st century sky scrapers with his tail by accident, melts tanks made of inches-thick steel, capsizes battleships and aircraft carriers, and takes hits from jet fighter planes without flinching. He would be so far beyond the scope of what exists in D&D, that I don't think it would be useful to model him mechanically. If you tried to make him "beatable" by giving him stats, say, equivalent to something like Tiamat, you'd have a statblock, but it wouldn't approach what the Godzilla in the movies can actually do. If you tried to make him true to the movies, the statblock would be prohibitive. Nothing in D&D can touch him other than (maybe) a Wish... but Godzilla's plot armor would probably prevent that as well.
(Also they kind of tried that in Godzilla vs. King Gidoroah by going back in time and making Godzilla never get into the radiation accident that created him, and it didn't work -- he came back bigger and stronger than ever by feeding off of the radiation in other places under the sea... so you can't even Wish there was never a Godzilla... he is a force of nature that cannot be stopped.)
I mean in terms of stats... the stat blocks can't even cover it. If a measly Tarrasque, which is only 70' long and 50' high and would barely come up to Godzilla's thigh, has 30 STR, how much more would Godzilla have? (But you can't go over 30, so there's one problem.) Godzilla would probably have a 30 AC, and a couple hundred hit dice, for thousands of hp. And his radiation breath would be insane... 1,000+ foot cone, 100' wide, and probably doing , I dunno, 50d8 or something of damage? What amount would be capable of melting tanks or armored naval vessels? He'd probably also be completely immune to most weapon types, even magic ones, just based on their size. (What good are arrows, even +3 arrows, going to do against Godzilla's hide?)
Old school Kong you could do (the 1930s one who was only 20' high) no problem. Godzilla-vs-Kong though, is as big and impossible as Godzilla... Again, I don't see how you could realistically make a stat block that adequately reflect the sheer size of and power of a Kaiju, given the scale of what else has been made in D&D already that is much tinier and weaker (Ancient dragons, TIamat, etc).
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
The whole point of Godzilla is that he's beyond human comprehension. He embodies the unimaginable power of nuclear destruction, created by the one country that suffered two nuclear bombs on civilian cities and had a collective nightmare about that for decades. The 2014 and 2019 movies in particular center around the concept that the threats humanity faces in them can't be dealt with by us - only Godzilla is strong enough for that. You can make a Godzilla-like flightless dragon monster at the extreme edge of what D&D allows, but that would essentially disregard what Godzilla is supposed to be.
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
I’ve already been considering kaiju and mechs (for plot related reasons, honest) and one idea I’ve had (but haven’t fully fleshed out yet mechanically) would be that the larger creatures were mostly fighting each other and performing in terms of regular stats, whilst any damage, spells, etc done by the party to them was divided by 10.
The kaiju and giant mechs would still have a lot of hp, but it means that a lot of the focus would switch to them attacking each other and dealing damage in their “regular” hits against each other, rather than the party taking down the larger creature directly.
Damage by those creatures onto PCs, or how AoEs, etc work on that scale haven’t been considered yet though.
Please take a look at my homebrewed Spells, Magic Items, and Subclasses. Any feedback appreciated.
I want to say AD&D's Legend and Lore had stats for Godzilla and King Kong under different names. I want to say there was a monster called I think a Gargantuan, and the stat block and entry allowed for a giant ape, a giant reptilian, and a giant insect. I want to say things like atomic flame were even assigned. I'm talking about a 30+ year old memory which consisted of me seeing them in a friends book and thinking "cool". Anyway it was clearly an effort by TSR to stat in Godzilla and King Kong into game terms while avoiding nasty letters from Toho and whoever owned King Kong at the time. IIRC the stats were absurd.
BW is right in that King Kong would need an "adaptable size to narrative needs" feature to vary from 20' to 20 stories, to whatever size he was in the Godzilla throw downs.
Godzilla basically would be unkillable. He rampages until he accomplishes his objective or gets bored and wanders away (I want to say rampaging till decides to go elsewhere was a trait noted in Legends and Lore). If it was found somehow to overload Godzilla to make him explode, well there was the Mothra save in a recent movie but in the 90s? Toho run, Godzilla was smart enough to have his son(?) Baby Godzilla in the blast radius so that when Godzilla did explode, when the dust cleared there was Late Adolescent Godzilla picking up the mantle as the credits rolled.
I'm not saying Godzilla is bigger than Dungeons and Dragons, though he sort of is. Earlier iteration of the big G would be problematic as its nature is very much tied to nuclear power, which isn't a thing in most D&D worlds. However, the notion that Godzilla "charges" itself from some not fully understood energy field form the earth makes it a little more playable in a D&D space.
I'd only use Godzilla the way the Leviathan was used in the Book of Job, to emphasize the point that no matter how great the humanoid party thinks they are there are (arguably literal) forces of nature they simply can't fathom, let alone contend with.
I have thought about Godzilla showing up in Avernus, after which all the parties involved in and ancillary to the Blood War actually take a pause and reflect on their excesses.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
For King Kong, I would select the appropriate giant and give him animal intelligence.
Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt
I would run them the way I'd run a hurricane or earthquake. They'd be an environmental hazard, and the goal would be to get to a safe distance before you get crushed/incinerated.
I would potentially let a high level party tip the scales between a close match, in the same way a decisive battle in a larger war might turn the tides.
My homebrew subclasses (full list here)
(Artificer) Swordmage | Glasswright | (Barbarian) Path of the Savage Embrace
(Bard) College of Dance | (Fighter) Warlord | Cannoneer
(Monk) Way of the Elements | (Ranger) Blade Dancer
(Rogue) DaggerMaster | Inquisitor | (Sorcerer) Riftwalker | Spellfist
(Warlock) The Swarm
This. It's a little like the once-in-a-while conversations about Cthulhu you see. Which isn't a coincidence, I don't think. I think you could probably draw a straight line between Lovecraft and Ray Harryhausen and the guys who made Godzilla.
My point is: heroic fantasy is entirely framed around the notion that the actions of heroes matter. Godzilla reframes that completely. The modern Universal ones do so explicitly for laughs.
You could probably find a system that accommodates Gamera vs Gyaos, but D&D's dice only go to 20, y'know?
I'm pretty sure Legends and Lore had stats for the Cthulhu mythos too, I think that's what got it slapped hard with a cease and desist if not full blown lawsuit from, maybe Chaosism possibly in league with the Lovecraft estate, and Legends and Lore consequently is harder to find in the used/collectors market.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Yeah, it did. I think they also changed the name from Deities and Demigods because of satanic panic, too (weirdly, I never heard about Moorcock or Lieber giving them any static, even though I would argue that TSR was working their streetcorner more than Lovecraft/Derleth et al)
Actually, 1e might have the right approach for Godzilla with everyone making a save vs insta-death every turn they spend within a 300m radius, whether or not they're engaged in combat.
You could probably stat them out in 3.5e. Godzilla is around 300' so call it 125,000x human strength, which is about 2^17, though being Colossal gave x16 so you only need 2^13, so he's Str 75 (base 10, and x2 strength = +5). Other abilities presumably on similar scale.
I thought they were different books (Deities and Demigods and Legends and Lore) but don't really remember. Moorcock I think didn't care, or at least thought the exposure would get more readers. I'm pretty sure there were Elric and Hawkmoon licensed RPGs in the 80s and I doubt anyone went after TSR then either. Tolkien's estate was notorious for protecting it's IP. Chaosism probably felt threatened with Cthulhu showing up in D&D and probably was irked having jumped through rights hoops for its games with the Lovecraft estate so it's not surprising they asserted their rights.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Apparently, the 1981 printing dropped the Cthulhu stuff and the 1985 printing initiated the name change.
I should go through my old boxes and see which of these I have. Not that it'd have any resale value. It probably has all kinds of ballpoint scribblings about my grade school thoughts on Stormbringer.
I think several people above have it right - Godzilla is akin to a force of nature. It's like saying you want to stat out the weather, or the rotation of the earth. He just operates on a scale so far beyond anything D&D was designed to depict that any attempt to do so would be incapable of truly capturing his nature.
Just think about his size and speed. All he has to do is walk and every step would take him completely out of range of all weapons, all attempts to dash to follow him, etc. It'd be like ants trying to keep up with a human. In fact this conversation kind of reminds me of the conversation between Nick Fury and Loki in the opening scene of Avengers, about how ants can't quarrel with a boot.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
I think Godzilla is one of those creations that exist with the mega damage mechanic from Palladium Games. And even maybe not.
"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
-Ilyara Thundertale
I love this. If you saw the recent one, there's a genuinely beautiful piece of movie-making where a certain giant monster (no spoilers) explodes a plane at an airport. As a dolly pans from left to right, you see the humans in the terminal reacting to what they witness. So: *scream* GIANT MONSTER!!! *scream* EXPLODING PLANE!!! *scream* THAT PLANE IS EXPLODING ANOTHER PLANE!!! *scream*
And then from the right side of the screen, a certain other giant monster's (no spoilers) foot comes down and all the humans go dead silent in dreadful awe!
If I ever have any cause or the nerve to write up an "Asia" to go with my main continent's "Europe," I've decided my Great Wall is going to be along the ocean, AND NO ONE WILL EVER TALK ABOUT WHY!
So basically he operates on the level of 8th to 9th level spells.
More like 10th level. You can't even Wish that guy away.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Which is funny, because all of Lovecraft's stuff was public domain by then.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
That's actually unknown even now (all the pre-1926 stuff is definitely public domain by now, the rest could in theory be protected but probably isn't), but TSR in 1981 probably didn't want to get into a possibly expensive legal fight over the issue.