How to make Throne of Lies a better social deduction game

Feedback/Suggestions
#1

When I play social deduction games im looking to do 2 thing’s

A: Lie

B: Find liers

Now in the game the BD is doing B and the Unseen/NK is usually doing A. This is great and all but the best rounds involve doing both.

Remember ToS? One of the best roles in that game is the unrevealed mayor. Why? Because your a town that can legitimately fake claim and has reason to do so. You can claim your invest ad that X person should wisper claim to you. Or that your jailor and everyone should claim to you now to save time. Someone calls you out on it and you reveal.

Now simply having an easily confirmable class is not good enough. You also need to give the evils a reason to act differently in the face of a lie.

There is 1 example of this I can think of: let’s say your Good king and the sheriff wants you to out an Unseen for him. You could wisper that unseen something like “Yo. Evil king here! Who is the other Unseen?” And then out them all when/if he tells you.

The key here is that the evils didn’t know all of their Ally’s and can be tricked because of it.

Now while there are roles like the witch in ToS that isn’t enough. What you need is an Unseen/Cult class that doesn’t meet with them that can get information on them and others.

Every heard of the corrupt in FoL? They had a source that was NS, could get classes and visits and was critical to winning. That’s the kind of class I’m talking about. If you act as a class like that then you get more information out of evils.

Now I’m not suggesting we add the corrupt but what I am saying is that we need a scum Neutral investigative that can be faked by BD to gain the unseen/cults trust.

There is another kind of uncertainty however. A class that can change your objective without telling you would open up so meny door’s.

Example: (this probably isn’t balanced at all)

The Evangelical - BD special

Night ability: Make a player’s wincon change to yours. Does not notify them or change their class. Will fail if used on an unconvertible neutral. (1 use)

The Corrector - Unseen special

Night ability: The next Conversion will not notify the target and will not change their class or add the the maximum Unseen (1 use)

You can them your class and what you just did (even if you did nothing). The example I gave would not work on its own but something similar might.

#2

Neutral Investigative roles are bad in general (Witchsigliere is a perfect example), and changing wincons seems unnecessary at best and game-destroying at worst.

I’m not sure I follow your reasoning behind either of these suggestions.

#3

I liked witch in ToS what’s wrong with her?

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#4

Neutral investigatives (not witchsig) can back up evils and provide them with alibis. This is important because if your BD then you can BS something to see how they act.

Hidden wincon changes means that you can convince someone things about THEMSELVES that are not true (if there is uncertainty about your win con then it is possible to convince you to act in ways that hurt your team without them truly knowing they are. The point is that giving the evils uncertainty about thier Ally’s means that the BD has reason to lie to them. Having uncertainty about your own wincon give BD a reason to lie to BD and unseen a reason to lie to Unseen.

Remember what I said is the point of social Deduction?

Lying and finding lyiers. If everyone has a reason to lie then everyone is doing both making the game more fun.

#5

Witchsigliere ends up outing her own allies more than helping them lmao

The core problem with Neutral Invests is their wincon. We don’t have any strict NEs yet, but that’s the only way you can kind of make one work

#6

NE is exactly what I’m suggesting. Technically it could be Social or Offensive or whatever. It just needs to be fake claimable by BD and sided with Evils.

#7

But BD should never be claiming Neutral, especially Neutral Evil

Which is where I lose the logic of your suggestion

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#8

You’re not claiming it publicly. Your acting like one to bait Evils or whisper claiming to them for the same reason.

#9

The king would be an example (although a bad one) of what I’m talking about. Whispering to the king that you are bad sometimes is worth the risk. Same goes for the King wispering to bad.

#10

I will say generically that i would like to see the social aspects of the game ramped up some

and I think that the core of this effort should be increasing princess spawn rate substantially

princess is VERY underrated, and is pretty much the goddess of catching false claims, particularly false NK claims

right now the way classes are spawning its very “click->die” oriented… and then counter strategies to those classes

i want to see more princess, more obs, and a return of old noble

#11

How does the princess improve social deduction? It just limits claimspace. It’s a good class and it’s existence is important but it doesn’t inherently improve the deduction aspect. We need more social classes and neutral classes.

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#12

Princess could be more viable in my opinion

#13

That’s not the point of this thread. I’m trying to solve the fact that BD aren’t lying and Unseen/Cult don’t need to worry about other people lying with the exception of the NK.

Yes I consider the fact that BD never lies a problem. It’s not a good idea for BD to lie but I wish it wasn’t so.

#14

If you start having everybody lying about everything to everybody the whole thing becomes a clusterfuck of double double double agents with no way of anyone having any real proof of anything .
As soon as caught out on anything just claim your a double agent and now the scum read you have just made is worthless , either you have fake scum read or the scum has double scummed , but if you cant be trusted on your actions or words as a bd then proving you are lying is impossible .

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#15

Personally I consider this to be a good thing. I love clusterfucks and you should remember that even if BD can lie doesn’tean they always will lie. It would mostly be done with classes that can prove themselves like Prince, Psychic or Noble and classes that can use that info on they’re own such as King and Hunter.

#16

Right but the thing to know is, the evils will almost always win in a clusterfuck. The one thing unseen has going for them, is that they can’t be fooled with regards to their most important allies.

Being able to prove yourself is all well and good, but many of your allies aren’t going to wait around for that, a knight, hunter or BD siding alc etc… isn’t going to wait for solid undeniable proof that the fool acting character is a fool, all they know is he seems clearly to be acting outside of the interests of the BD, and that the only reason there’s been a delay in putting him up to the stand is the fear of a fool.

Not to mention when people actually do what everyone in that position of lying as BD claims they should… IE investigate before lynching, it’s even worse… So you’ll often wind up with scenerios like.

Prince is acting like a fool. that night hunter wolfs him, observer window peaks him. knight attacks him. So next day he comes out and explains it, now you’ve basically wasted one of the 2 use abilities, if you are lucky you’ve only wasted a physicians heal if you have one available. Killed a knight, and still had to come out anyway. Meanwhile the unseen/cult got to act pretty freely that night. Converted and/or killed… while all the BD was busy focusing on their own.

Whether you find it fun or not… surely you have to acknowledge that 99/100 times those things don’t go well.

#17

this is why you would only ever do this over a day or 2 and as a class you can prove yourself as. You lie to someone in a wispier which causes them to out as evil. In response you kill them. You lie to everyone as Psychic to get people to whisper claim to you only to then use telepathy to drop the ruse. You obviously need to be smart about it. Now that I think about it these kinds of things would need another mode (chaos mode?) to allow for noobs to not be dropped into a game with this happening.

#18

OK I can kind of see the point, In cases of which the full circle of events takes place between the start and finish of a single day. Even taking out the hunter and knight, it still completely screws over more or less the entire investigative forces of the BD if it reaches nightfall, and if you are deliberately being sus, most likely even evils won’t be too likely to try and contact you, as the last thing they want to do is be caught whispering to someone that all eyes are already on that’s probably going down in a day or 2

#19

I already do lie as BD, to people who may or may not be evil.

-check them, special/investigative-
-whisper them next day pretending to be sheriff asking for class-
-they claim hunter, get them lynched, MM down D2-

I like the idea of a neutral evil/investigative, but secret wincon changes would make game throwing reports very hard to go through.

#20

The NE is honestly the better way to go about this. The secret wincon change is just a way to bring it to the next level.

Unfortunately this games might not be designed for information about yourself hidden from yourself