Comic #987: Easy Mode (Patreon)

As I mentioned in the previous commentary, this was the original comic idea I was working on before I came up with the idea for #986.

This was something that I remember used to happen all the time with friends. We would enter a dungeon and start killing mobs before putting the key in.

There has been a lot of conversations around the difficulty level of endgame content after the changes to encounters and fight mechanics. That topic was my original idea for the comic. The obvious original punchline was to just show Keydar and Narya failing to content after their big talk, but i just felt that was way too obvious.

So my next idea was that maybe the key was easy not because the content was easy, but because the key was lower than they thought it was. Maybe someone put in a lower key by mistake. The problem with this idea was how much exposition it required to get the point across. Sometimes when you have to drop too much information into the punchline just for the reader to get it, it kind of kills the joke. Then it came to me that they could have just forgotten to put the keystone into the font. This also allowed me to have a fun visual gag where the entire rest of the party is just standing there looking at them with complete exasperation.

I also liked putting in that beat just before the punchline where Krom sarcastically calls them "Top tier". It helps sell the bait and switch where the first half of the comic feels like the game mechanics are the butt of the joke, and the punchline reveals instead that Keydar & Narya are.