Showa-era kaiju RPG stats?

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1F409
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Showa-era kaiju RPG stats?

Post by 1F409 »

I have been working on a free, fan-made adaptation of the Showa-era kaiju, for a popular role-playing game system. The monsters' individual powers and morphology are easy enough to write up, but deciding their attribute levels (dexterity, intelligence, etc.) is where I cannot make up my mind.

I believe there are two solutions: either adapt stats from someone else's work on the subject (which means I'd be limited to the versions of the monsters they chose to present), or come up with a set of criteria for reviewing the source material and judging which instances warrant an adjustment to a given attribute score.

My searches for other game adaptations have, thus far, uncovered attempts in the d20 System, GURPS, and Marvel Super Heroes (FASERIP), but always piecemeal, left unfinished, or showcasing the wrong era of kaiju. I had hopes, also, for the Monster Island RPG, but I'm having difficulty figuring out which of its monsters are meant as stand-ins for (or combinations of) famous movie kaiju; plus, its point-based design system means that some monsters get shoehorned into a given tier.

With the "official" statistics for kaiju weight being so odd and inconsistent, I've taken to calculating a reasonable alternative using models extracted from video games. The few Showa-era models that I have been able to find, I have scaled to their official heights and taken volume measurements from that. Being that the various kaiju are unique, there is no consistent way to deduce musculature from volume alone, but it can be enlightening when it comes to monsters wrestling with, or even lifting, each other.

Suggestions are welcome. Thank you.
Last edited by 1F409 on Wed Apr 14, 2021 7:51 pm, edited 1 time in total.

1F409
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Re: Showa-era kaiju RPG stats?

Post by 1F409 »

Did I post in the wrong section?

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Corzak The Mighty
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Re: Showa-era kaiju RPG stats?

Post by Corzak The Mighty »

I'm honestly not really sure where you would post a question like this, but I'll take a shot at it.

If you're hoping for a more concrete system to convert kaiju into, in my experience, you'll have to do it yourself and many systems simply don't support monsters of that caliber. The kaiju will either end up just being a big bruiser-style enemy that just hits hard and has a fuckload of hit points, akin to the tarrasque in D&D, or it will simply be unfun to fight due to being far too difficult to hurt due to its damage resistances. In an extremely crunchy system such as GURPS or Shadowrun, they would simply be too complex and impossibly in-depth to run feasibly due to all the moving parts and the logical immunities/damage resistance they would have to conventional forms of attack.

I would recommend looking into more streamlined systems that allow for better freeflow of gameplay like FATE or Cypher. Since those systems are more roleplay-oriented and less mechanically intense, I feel it works better to convert a kaiju into those systems.
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1F409
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Re: Showa-era kaiju RPG stats?

Post by 1F409 »

Corzak The Mighty wrote: Sun May 16, 2021 3:52 pmIf you're hoping for a more concrete system to convert kaiju into, in my experience, you'll have to do it yourself and many systems simply don't support monsters of that caliber. The kaiju will either end up just being a big bruiser-style enemy that just hits hard and has a skreeonkload of hit points, akin to the tarrasque in D&D, or it will simply be unfun to fight due to being far too difficult to hurt due to its damage resistances.
To clarify, I'm not looking for a system to use, rather someone's existing adaptation to gauge stats by. Any system will have its peculiarities in the special traits granted to such monsters (armored skin, fiery breath, etc.), but most systems agree that all animate creatures have common stats (dexterousness, intellect, strength, etc.); and that's where I'm hoping that someone else may have already laid the ground work.

To be frank, I haven't the foggiest idea whether Godzilla should be healthier, smarter, or more nimble than Hedorah, or Mothra than Varan, and so on.
Given a realistic justification for boosting a stat -- say, if lizards have faster reaction times than moths -- there may be reason to modify all creatures in a given category. However, I don't want to make the mistake of just copying stats from some RPG bestiary, based on my uneducated guess about which animals are a close match to a given kaiju.

As for the potential clunkiness of game systems in dealing with gigantic monsters, that's why my plan is to design the kaiju as if they're rubber-suit-sized non-human actors, on set making monster movies about fictitious giant versions of themselves.
Last edited by 1F409 on Fri Jul 16, 2021 10:26 am, edited 2 times in total.

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