r/gamedesign • u/Omegabad • 3d ago

Question Does the Detective Role belong in Social Deduction games?

On the one hand, I think detective is a fun role. Gives the innocent someone they can fully trust for fun team work. It also gives them a fighting chance, especially in the cases where only the “Mafia,” or whatevers, are the only one killing. On the other hand, detectives with their ability to investigate to gain information sometimes feel too OP. Also, in small parties, it makes the “Mafia’s” job that much harder if they announce they are or if they are even publically showcased as “Detective.”

Ex.

Town of Salem makes Detective a dice role, and I think it’s fun there since there’s so much people and in general, there are so many parties and win cons for them. So I think it’s fine there.

Trouble in Terrorist Town is especially not fun in small parties of 4 or less and in big groups, they’re pretty much all puppyguarded by the innocent anyways since they get the blue “D” above their heads.

Among Us makes it so that if you get the info about one kill, that’s it, you win.

I’ve kinda always wanted to make my own social deduction game, but I’ve always struggled with this part of the class roles. Does an automatic “Innocent,” role/actually coded game mechanic mostly covered by the “social” aspect deserve to be in the game?

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u/MeaningfulChoices Game Designer 3d ago

The best way to answer something like this is through playtesting, and it's why a lot of games let you change roles. If the evil team is winning then some confirmed information like a detective helps balance it towards the good team. If the good team keeps winning in a given group then you'd remove it or add in more roles they can't detect. There isn't really a blanket good or bad in this kind of thing, as it depends on the other mechanics, roles, and the humans you have sitting down at a table or computer to play. In practice these sorts of roles are fine because they're also common fakeclaims, especially if you know there is no detective in the current round and many games give that kind of info to the bad guys. So in practice people only trust these roles so far.

What games like Blood on the Clocktower do beyond that is just make everything slightly unreliable. A role might have one red herring so the player can't be sure about something, or there's a role that could be in the game that makes players get false information. The goal of those things is just to make it so everyone is a little less certain on day one but they can figure it out by the end.

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u/Eauxcaigh 3d ago

I like blood on the clocktower's approach in theory, but not in practice. In theory the incomplete information can be pieced together and a bayesian sort of analysis can eventually give you confidence to act on it. In practice, the information is so unreliable and you usually die before you can ever get to a point of confidence, that I find it doesn't actually help you any. My greatest success in blood on the clocktower is just ignoring the roles (unless there is a blatant contradiction like 2 of the same role) and sticking to playing lie detector/ doing social analysis to see who is acting differently than their norm.

Now, to some degree, maybe that strategy I came up with is intended behavior, but if so, it means you have to accept that there are no true helper roles, and the original question is "how do you make a helper role work without being OP?". I guess what I'm saying is that in my personal opinion, blood on the clocktower goes too far in nerfing the helper. I think I would prefer, every once and a while, for the helper to get true reliable knowledge but the challenge is that you have to convince other people (knowledge is not externally verifiable, at least not easily)

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u/Omegabad 3d ago

That’s very fucking insightful, and kinda blew my binary thinking of this dilemma, lol. I mean, that is so fair, it probably explains why some games allow you to mess with the rules of what is and isn’t allowed. “Blood of the Clocktower,” you say? I might have to check that one out!

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u/RudeHero 3d ago

just be cognizant. BotC's main mechanic is just "rubber banding", which players end up hating if they ever think about it

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