Cleon
Hero
I was just thinking the DM could stack 5 ft cubes next to each other filling up an appropriate type area, rather than doing any math! While I think we're both on good terms with the square or cube root, I've seen enough people complain about multiplication to want to avoid that.
I think I'd rather make it a spread or burst, but don't really mind which of the two it is.
I'd rather the explosion be bigger for the largest booms, but for the sake of argument let's keep it simple by forgetting about splash/secondary damage and having one grade match the area of effect radius and damage of a standard fireball (i.e. 20 ft. and 5d6 to 10d6).
So the explosion would be, say, a 5 ft. radius for a 1d6 blast; 10 ft. radius for a 2d6 to 4d6 blast; 20 ft. radius for a 5d6 to 10d6 blast; 30 ft. radius for a 11d6 to 15d6 blast; and 40 ft. radius for a 16d6 or higher blast.
Are we tying the damage done to the number of morsels? I guess we could instead make the size of the explosion in feet independent of the number of morsels (maybe it just has to do with how far the fumes spread), but the damage is 1d6 per morsel or whatever. How's that?
One problem with that is the cheese can explode before it's cut into morsels.
The original basically did 1d6 damage per Hit Dice/caster level of the caprine, so how about that's the damage an entire individual vat of killer cheese does, but if it's cut up into morsels it loses a good deal of explosive potency.
I'm not sure how to avoid the giant pile of killer cheese problem. Maybe caprines don't like to work together that much? Or maybe it would be fun to have a giant explosion! Giving the cheese a 1 day expiry date might help mitigate the problem a bit.
While I'm fine with giant explosions I don't want them to be too easy. My preferred solution is to have the "vat explosion" and "morsel explosion" be scaled differently, plus have the morsels last longer. Say a day or a few hours for the vat explosion, and days or a week for the morsels. Soft unpausterised cheeses last for a few weeks in our reality but that's with the benefit of modern refrigeration.
Might as well try roughing up a rough draft…