My players had the opposite question: what happens with detonating part of a charge of cylex? They were using it to mine for valuable scrap in the formerly-haunted valley in Scrapwall. One player wants to attach bits of cylex to arrows to weaponize it further, but has not done so yet.
I ruled that the area of effect shrinks for smaller charges, but the damage and save DC are the same. Keeping track of only a single change is easier for me. The same reasoning would be that multiple charges affect a larger area, but deal the same damage.
Higher damage or higher DC would let the cylex be more effective against higher-CR creatures, so limiting the damage would prevent the cylex from dominating future encounters.
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They attached it to javelins and detonated it with fireballs changed to deal lightning damage. Talk about from the frying pan into the fire...
Also, they managed to stick a dose to Hellion's chassis, about a round before he blew up, which also set off the cylex. I didn't really feel like having the campaign end right there with the party getting blow up for winning one of the hardest fights I've ever run against them, so I let them run out while not looking at explosions. But they lost loot opportunities of course because that certainly collapsed the cave.
My PCs had a lot of fun with the cylex...
First, they used some of it to blow up the dish. So far, so good.
Later, when they were fighting
she turned herself invisible and tried to escape after they were kicking her butt. They knew she was getting away, so they attached a charge of cylex to an arrow and had the ranger shoot it in her direction (with some hefty penalties, but he got it close enough to her anyway). Boom.
The best moment was in the last book, when
So things were not looking good for the party; they were managing to damage the thing, but not quickly enough. The ranger hauled the bodies of their fallen comrades out of harm's way, after the psychic told him to get them out (psychic was actually kind of a tank for a caster; he had more hp than the vigilante did). He knew things were a bit dire...so he lightning arc'd between their remaining cylex and the robot. Explosion ensued. At that point, I just ruled that the cylex charges added together to create a massive explosion, since he detonated them all at once.
The psychic managed to survive in single-digit hp thanks to his force field. Robot was alive, but pretty severely damaged, at which point the ranger (having heard explosion) came running back and finished him off. It was a pretty intense fight. That cylex saved their bacon.
I think it's not a game breaker. You can easily limit the amount of charges the PC can get, and if they use it to blow something up it may sound like the easy way, but they will also blow up at least a great part of the loot, too. So if they want to recover some fancy items, they should think twice, before cylexing the hell out of everything.