Lying as Evil is too difficult

Feedback/Suggestions
#1

In Mafia type games, there are two methods of deduction: Social and Logical.

Social deduction involves making reads in other player’s behavior in the way they talk (or not talk) and vote.

Logical deduction involves taking in all claims and night actions and seeing what does not add up.

The problem lies in the logical deduction part. There are so many night actions and ways to cross-reference claims. For example, you can claim Physician as Assassin, but then a Princess can see you are killer/off and you instantly get exed.

Now you may think, well shouldn’t you claim something that makes it hard for people to cross-reference? Every class that is ideal for that has turned into a meme. KNIGHT CLAIM LUL CW CLAIM LUL PRINCESS LUL. I’ve found that the only consistent plays I can do as evil are extremely risky claims like Alchemist or even Mercenary (telling my evil partner to claim he was guarded). Otherwise, you’re just sitting there hoping the spotlight doesn’t shine on you.

Lying in this game is too difficult. In fact, the most ideal way to play evil is 100% social. You have to steer chat to such bedlam in order to pass into the mid and end game unscathed. This isn’t always possible.

Not to mention Day 1 debs or investigations. Good luck. There is zero counter play. In typical Mafia games, you could counter-claim or your evil partner could counter claim that investigative. Doing that is suicide because BD has enough numbers, jails, king exe or CS (or DK) to make sure that even in the worst case scenario, you are trading a BD for an evil.

Don’t get me started on D1 scouts

Enough with me going on and on, let me shine light on the core problems that allow this to happen.

  • No one knows what the role composition of the match is, so you can’t plan your counter claims and craft appropriate lies.
  • Too many players means that BD can afford bad exes. In fact, bad exes are typically good for BD, as it narrows down the evil players that have shaky enough claims as it is.
  • Every class is semi-unique, meaning you can’t claim a role that “blends in” with the majority. The ones that you can use to blend in (phys, knight, CW) are already super suspicious claims and you’ll instantly get exed for it.
  • There are some classes with night actions that absolutely dick you. Debauchery is unfun to use and unfun to play against. What can you possibly do when you get debbed? Even in the best case scenario where you claim Drunk and say you debbed the real Drunk and actually get him exed, you’re just going to jail and dying. Trading a majority player for a minority is never good.
  • The majority of classes are impossible to claim without someone pointing out your shit logs. GL claiming Observer or Psychic or Prince or anything that hasn’t become a meme already.

Personally, the best solution to this problem involves reducing the player count per lobby and changing how class compositions are spawned each game. I suggest the following changes:

  • Reduce lobby count to 14
  • Show the class composition of each game (instead of the vague guidelines it has now)
  • Adding vanilla BD roles and making power roles actual power roles (rather than villagers with low impact night actions)

There are other possible changes, but starting with this could be a good start.

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#2

It’s kind of the point of the game. You try to find the evils, and each one has an imperfect claim. You make it easy to lie as evil, you don’t have ToL anymore. This isn’t something that needs to be fixed. This is essential to the game.

#3

Well those solutions sound a lot like Town of Salem though. Throne of Lies is meant to be more complex, more unique in its classes, and more in depth. And wouldn’t not having a class composition be better for the evil? Otherwise, Blue Dragon can simply check the graveyard and go down the line of what classes could be left and what classes have multiple claims.

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#4

Playing evil is RNG. That should not be part of the game.

#5

You have to assign classes randomly. Playing a game is accepting what you get. Sometimes you get a cool class, sometimes you get a different one. This is a core part of the game.

#6

Yeah I don’t know what you are talking about and I don’t think you are referring to anything I wrote so ok.

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#7

It can be complex with logs and stuff, but good luck making convincing logs as evil. The only way you win is hoping the spotlight isn’t shined on you till the mid and end game.

#8

Vague role composition works. I can’t say how to be honest, but I think it is how ToL is better than ToS. Why reduce Lobby Count to 14? I see no reason for this. Bad lynches can’t just screw the BD. You need some room for error.

#9

ngl this just sounds like a confirmability issue

When every claim is as solid as a Knight claim, we’re set :+1:

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#10

Honestly, this is part of the reason I’m so against splitting the community with a “Veterans” lobby, etc.

When only experienced players play, any evil ploy will just fall apart. There will be “accepted” fake logs, game theory, etc. Which removes fun.

#11

Words cannot express how completely and utterly wrong you are here. Allowing logical deduction alone to reliably solve things is bad for social deduction games; it can support very low-level play early on, but as soon as players master the mechanics, it makes the game boring, repetitive, and uninteresting, because experienced players will spot an “imperfect claim” instantly 100% of the time.

BD should have to use trust and cooperation in order to win, as well as analyzing (that is, scumreading) evils based on their actions; that means that detecting evils should require cross-referencing information from more than one person, as well as looking at their behavior, votes, and so on. No claim that is important to the meta should ever be reliably refutable by a single person using logic alone (without relying on additional evidence outside the claim itself and its presented will); allowing things to devolve to that state breaks the game. Excessive confirmability is one of the most serious problems the game has at the moment, and absolutely needs to be the primary consideration when evaluating any suggestion made here.

It’s silly that you’d suggest that BD needs to be able to solve the game by process of elimation. ToL gives BD far more tools to investigate and force evils to claim or make a stand than most social deduction games; this, in turn, lets them try and force evils to slip up, and leads to an interesting emergent meta because no one strategy can dominate.

This should be an idealized goal, yes. It’s an ideal to shoot for, not something that is literally attainable (not every role literally needs to be that hard to confirm; some can’t, and it’s OK to have a few like the Prince as long as sufficient claimspace for evils exists), but generally-speaking, a good role should be as hard to confirm as the Knight or the Court Wizard, and if you’re making a role more difficult to confirm you should have a good reason as to why it’s necessary.

The heart of the game usually focuses on finding the NK and MM; making that too easy (by leaving them without claimspace) is terrible for the game. Therefore, we need to modify as many BD roles as possible to make it harder for them to prove that they’re BD.

(Well, let’s be honest, in the current meta the BD barely needs to work to find the NK at all - most of the time they’re just uncovered automatically by running out of claimspace. But that’s something we need to fix - not to keep the game fun for NKs, but to keep the game fun and interesting for everyone.)

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#12

Basicaly what we need is to reduce confirmability to the point that hte only time a class is confirmable is after it’s dead. (+Prince, of course)

#13

Or at least a fully unconfirmable class in every BD class type.
Then Princess can’t catch you with it
Or CONTROVESY ALERT
CONTROVESY ALERT
We remove Royal BLood
END CONTROVERSY
END CONTROVERSY

#14

I mean, for example, what is most important is making sure that Assasssin and Mastermind have a variety of strong fakeclaims to use. Most Unseen classes can claim their previous convert, in fact all of them should be able to.

However, what could be said is that being changed to Assassin there would screw your fakeclaim over. So we’d need to use factional kills instead of a dedicated Killer.

Let’s face it, if we want to make the game fully competetively viable we need to change an absoloute mountain of things.

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#15

Oh and finally we really need to make it actually possible to fakeclaim Doctor in a game.
I mean Doc is one of the easiest claims to fake, so why have Death Knights to confirm the Physician to the Psychic? It’s just plain RNG

MULTIPOST RANT OVER

#16

I think there is only one problem with this;
Too many people would be stepping up to be king at once, and there would be an information overload. Especially if the king dies early, you could have like 13 people stepping up to be king at once.

Other than that, I’m not against this change

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#17

While I agree a little bit with the fact that logical deduction might overrule the social deduction too much, I think you really neglected to mention a key part of ToL: conversion. That Physician that just healed the prince and you thought you could trust, might just be the new assassin that will stab him in the back. The psychic telepathy message that everyone always trusts, woops a frame from illusionist. Yes, the BD will always find you eventually given enough uses of their night abilities, however you should not allow the game to get there. It’s a race to the clock for both factions. Besides, I think too many unseen members forget that they are and should be expendable once they reach the 3 member limit, since MM has to convert again to kill most efficiently. Plus the very existence of the scorned always gives you some claimspace.

#18

Conversion definitely gives ToL a bit more leeway than eg. ToS in this respect (ToS absolutely would not be playable at all with this many auto-confirming roles, whereas conversion keeps ToL at least playable.)

However, this doesn’t provide a huge amount of help to the Mastermind, initial Assassin, initial Cult Leader, or NKs. (The Possessor can sort-of rely on possessing someone who proved previously - but they won’t be able to prove again, and this tends to become obvious once people are on the alert for a possessor. They also flatly have to have the Psychic die to have any chance at all.)

And most of the time, finding the Mastermind and NK are a huge part of the game, so we obviously can’t write them off or make it too easy.

Cult has different but related problems where the powers of their converted roles don’t always line up well enough with their original role to let them continue claiming.

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#19

The thing is that this is false. Sacrificing a player gives you: A misslynch from the suicide accusation itself, A conversion slot and if your cult you get 2 erraticates. Then you convert and have lost nothing.

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#20

I agree with the OP. Throne of Lies is a great game but it still suffers in that it’s driven too much by logical deduction than social deduction.

Not to mention Day 1 debs or investigations. Good luck. There is zero counter play.

This is especially a problem for Reaper, as it makes him instantly lose the game. Lategame debs can be countered though by baiting a drunk to deb you and then doing nothing that night (I won as Reaper by doing that).

Reaper should have some sort of counterplay to n1 debs. No idea how though.

No one knows what the role composition of the match is, so you can’t plan your counter claims and craft appropriate lies.

If the game gives information about role composition, it should only be given to evils and definitely not BD. If it’s given to BD it defeats the entire purpose of what you are proposing.

Too many players means that BD can afford bad exes. In fact, bad exes are typically good for BD, as it narrows down the evil players that have shaky enough claims as it is.

Actually bad exes hurt BD and help the evil faction, since evil can replenish their numbers but BD can’t.

The majority of classes are impossible to claim without someone pointing out your shit logs.

This is true, and I think the solution to this is to give evils more abilities to confirm themselves. Maybe increase the population limit of Unseen to 4 so we can keep confirmable Unseen in the game without having them immediately being turned into Assassin. A Drunk that gets converted to Assassin is absolutely screwed if he gets put on stand, and this is because he didn’t deb or happy hour anyone that night. This has nothing to do with social deduction. If however an Alcoholic gets put on stand, the court can debate why is he happy houring the Sheriff who’s been carrying the game, and THIS is social deduction. We need more of it.

Reduce lobby count to 14

Please no, not sure how this helps at all.

Show the class composition of each game (instead of the vague guidelines it has now)

Only to the evil factions.

Allowing logical deduction alone to reliably solve things is bad for social deduction games; it can support very low-level play early on, but as soon as players master the mechanics, it makes the game boring, repetitive, and uninteresting, because experienced players will spot an “imperfect claim” instantly 100% of the time.

This 100%.

While I agree a little bit with the fact that logical deduction might overrule the social deduction too much, I think you really neglected to mention a key part of ToL: conversion. That Physician that just healed the prince and you thought you could trust, might just be the new assassin that will stab him in the back. The psychic telepathy message that everyone always trusts, woops a frame from illusionist. Yes, the BD will always find you eventually given enough uses of their night abilities, however you should not allow the game to get there. It’s a race to the clock for both factions. Besides, I think too many unseen members forget that they are and should be expendable once they reach the 3 member limit, since MM has to convert again to kill most efficiently. Plus the very existence of the scorned always gives you some claimspace.

Unfortunately Unseen converted classes are rare because of the 3 member limit. It should be increased to 4 and then other things changed to compensate if this turns out to be overpowered for evil.

Possessors also flatly have to have the Psychic die to have any chance at all.

This is a problem with the Possessor that for some reason doesn’t look like it will be fixed anytime soon. The psychic hardcounters possessor even though this isn’t intended and nothing is being done about it.

Honestly, this is part of the reason I’m so against splitting the community with a “Veterans” lobby, etc.

When only experienced players play, any evil ploy will just fall apart. There will be “accepted” fake logs, game theory, etc. Which removes fun.

The problems should be fixed, not masked by mixing noobs with experienced players just so noobs can throw games in evil’s favor. I want a vets lobby in spite of these problems, and it will actually highlight these problems so they can be dealt with more efficiently. I don’t think it’s fun knowing I won as evil only because my opponents didn’t understand how the game works.

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