Explosives seem really OP

(Flair chosen just because that's where I'm at in reading, but I don't think I'll be spoiling anything in the post that isn't already obvious from book 1)

From a game design perspective, it's just glaringly obvious that explosives are far and away the best way to progress though the dungeon, farm exp, and trivialize quest objectives. The fact that Carl is able to solve so many problems by just loading up an area with explosives ahead of time, or by loading up a rolling object with explosives and just sending it on ahead... he one-shots bosses or rooms full of enemies this way without ever having to even START combat with them, over and over again.

It's hard to imagine that none of the other crawlers who see how successful Carl is don't decide to immediately implement explosives into their combat tactics.

The only thing I can think of is that the "instability" system is supposed to balance it out: that crawlers are supposed to blow themselves up before they ever get their explosives skill high enough to pick a class that allows them to handle explosives safely and that it's luck (and/or the AI putting a finger on the scale in Carl's favor) that allowed Carl to get the point where he's at.

Either that or the situation where Carl was originally able to obtain such a large amount of explosives and explosive-crafting material, Donut's insane charisma allowing them to clear out the entire goblin clan without combat, was unforseen and unintended, in which case this might be more a case of "Enhances Pet Biscuits are OP" which is probably also true.