Comic #986: Indisposed (Patreon)

For my readers that no longer play, this joke is about one of the new mechanics in the Prey system. Basically you perform tasks in a zone in order to find and kill a "prey" target. However while you do so, there are a series of affixes that affect your player. One affix in particular, "Bloody Command" does the following:

Astalor occasionally commands you to kill an enemy, causing you to bleed for massive Physical damage if you fail.

This thing pops up at random times with no care for what you're currently doing and can be hilariously inconvenient. At first I didn't even bother reading the affixes and went on with my life ignoring them until this one eventually obliterated me.

Until yesterday I had a completely different comic idea I was planning for today. The original idea was going to involve Keydar & Narya condescendingly whining about how easy the game is. I might still do that one next time.

However, I hopped on the game for a bit yesterday and started doing some Prey events. As I was doing the event, the Bloody Command affix kept going off during some of the most inconvenient annoying times. On one occasion it went off while I was in a vehicle for a world quest, which required me to jump out of the vehicle multiple times to go find a mob to kill before I died.

Eventually I had to use the bathroom, so I went AFK in a town thinking I would be safe, but the affix went off anyway and killed me. I was so annoyed I came up with the current idea on the spot. It also gave me a good excuse to draw an outhouse again.

At first I had two half-panels in the center showing the outhouse, effectively giving the comic 4 total panels. In the end I decided it looked and worked better if I just had 3 panels, all the same size.