Been rewatching some of the old Godzilla movies lately with a friend who has never seen them, and had a silly idea for a Godzilla Genesys one-off. Leaving this topic here so I can revisit it once I've thought it out some more.

If anyone else has ideas to suggest for how to run a Kaiju game, by all means, post away!

Are the player characters kaiju or just citizens of the beleaguered city?

If they are all kaiju, I would use normal rules for them and their opponents (with the appropriate massive narrative descriptions for their actions and attacks) and keep them at personal scale. If an attack fails, oops there goes a skyscraper. Also, think about city blocks and buildings having stat blocks. It would require creating less powerful vehicles, but you should be able to keep everything low rating and keep it fun. Just remember to make vehicles into minions and have personal scale as well.

If you are planning on the characters being humans, I think I would use vehicle rules for the kaiju with a generous helping of armor and "hull threshold".

Thanks for the suggestions, FangGrip! Really helpful

I'm currently thinking of three possibilities here.

Option 1: Mechagodzilla

The players are vanilla humans fighting against a giant kaiju attacking their city, possibly more than one. However, the players have access to a giant fighting robot to combat the kaiju.

Option 2: H.E.A.T.

The players are vanilla humans with an allied Kaiju NPC. The players are effectively the brains of the operation, finding weaknesses in enemy kaiju and supporting the kaiju on their side through various means. Inspired by the 1999 Godzilla animated series.

Option 3: Battle Royale

All the players are playing as a kaiju, but each of them has different stats, abilities, and objectives.

For the first two options, I'd probably be using vehicle-scale stats for the various kaiju. And of course, coming up with all sorts of fun collateral damage rules. For option 3, I'd have players stat out their monsters like regular player characters, and would give wound thresholds to buildings, cliffsides, ect. I'd also probably use the exploding dice option for 'super' stats.

More to come as I think of it.

Godzilla always felt like a force of nature to the humans. I would play it as part of the environment.

Godzilla being controlled by Dr. Sinister and the PCs are super secret agents trying to thwart Sinister's vile machinations could be fun. Big G could be an environment thing like K said, all kinda Cool,Discipline, and Coordination chex for addressing him.

A springboard off of the "Battle Royale" concept stated a couple of posts ago:

I'm thinking about the old "Ogre" wargame by Steve Jackson Games, where one player was the Ogre (sort of a super-tank for those unfamiliar with the game) and one player was a whole army fighting the Ogre … maybe you could run a one-shot where the players were Godzilla or similar giganto beasts terrorizing the city and the GM played the civilians and armies trying to stop the monsters. Probably not easy to run since a Godzilla would be uberpowerful and there would be so many NPCs for the GM to deal with, but it could be fun trying to knock down buildings and battle other monsters.

A cool concept. I just wanted to run with it a little....

Oh man, kaiju would make an awesome one-shot. Great idea.