Exploding Kobold Encounter?

[The Roguish Chef]

so my party is level 10, got a harpoon wielding fighter, a ranger with an orc hornbow, and a gunslinger with a rifle. APL is 9, campaign is set in the victorian era. I want to have an encounter with some kamikaze koblods with a stick of dynamite on their back and detonators in their palms. I'm not quite sure how I want to balance this though. my homebrew dynamite sticks work like so, 3d4 Bludgeoning 2d4 Fire, DC 16 Reflex for Half radius of 10 ft, and additional sticks increase damage substantially, DC, and fuse time (I based it on the necklace of fireballs which btw you can yeet the whole string of the damn things for one big super fireball if you didn't know already lol) and I plan on giving them 1 stick of dynamite each so it would just be base damage though. so I have the damage worked out but the finer details of the mechanics I need some suggestions, should detonating be a melee touch attack? should these guys ideally be one shot to kill?, should they explode on death like exploding skeletons? should I let the dynamite be lootable given it's power when given additional sticks? do you think the damage model needs work considering i want to throw a horde of these lil buggers at them? let me know your thoughts and suggestions

[Joey Cote]

Consider this - If the kobolds are running around suiciding with sticks of dynamite, that implies they probably figured out how to make it. And since kobolds are not well known for being wealthy, that implies that the process to make it is fairly cheap. Do you really want to give your players the chance to reverse engineer and to make cheap, powerful explosives?

[King_Namazu]

it isn't cheap at 350gp a stick they were given it by a well funded organisation,there is currenty nothing stopping the group from grabbing 600 kegs of gunpowder and nuking my bosses with it, except for the fact they aren't complete a&%~~$!s

[Meirril]

... if the Kobolds were the ones producing the explosives I think they would put a bit more effort into figuring out how to use it without blowing themselves up.

The actual implication is that something powerful is controlling the Kobolds to perform suicide attacks that involve blowing themselves up. We're talking something that motivates these Kobolds to disregard their own lives to kill the party. The why of that should be answered during the adventure, and it better be a convincing answer. Magic mind control, an actually powerful dragon, the party killed a bunch of kobolds before, religion, lots and lots of drugs and conditioning.

I can see 2 set ups. One is the Kobolds are determined to blow up the party. Have each kobold have a fuse that they need to spend a standard action to light the fuse, and it blows up at the end of their next turn. That gives them 1 move this turn, and a full round the next turn to get into position to do the most damage. If any other kobolds get caught in the explosion its a 50% chance to detonate them as well. If they don't explode, there is a 50% chance their bomb is destroyed by the other explosion.

The more sinister plan would be to include a non-kobold leader that has a way to detonate the kobolds. Like if the bombs are fire sensitive they explode if ignited/attacked by fire. The leader can use the ignite cantrip, and has a fireball if he wants to nuke the party/kobolds. The Kobolds act like desperate fighters armed with spears, and the leader can detonate both living and dead kobolds by tageting them with fire. Or the party could detonate them. Burning hands would be very painful.

[yukongil]

you can possibly solve the problem of giving the party too powerful a resource by instead of having suicide kobolds, just having inept ones with a very dangerous substance. The kobolds WANT to kill the PCs with the boom boom sticks, but those sticks have the nasty habit of just detonating at random, given the rigors of running into combat with them, magical fire being tossed around and kobolds being notoriously bad at judging lengths of fuse and throwing distance.

The end result is that most of them suicide trying to get within tossing range (which just happens to be within range of a PC), but that was not the intention. You show a few gory "accidental" discharges and the PCs will probably forgo looting anything that may randomly kill them when they're adventuring.