Role Categories Are Deduction Tools

Left to their own devices, players create terminology for patterns they encounter in games. My favorite example is the term "cantrip" in Dominion: it refers to actions that give both an action and a card draw, meaning they have zero opportunity cost. This is called chunking and is a natural part of how people master a system. We can help the chunking process by naming common patterns ourselves as designers, which is especially important when designing social deduction games.

Unlike most games, social deduction games revolve around secret information tied to each player's role. This creates a problem in games with many roles: keeping track of who claimed what becomes nearly impossible, even for experienced players, especially when claims are deliberately vague. Classifying roles with tags makes it easier to sort players into groups and creates a natural basis for deduction puzzles.

Many social deduction games have built-in team categories; in Werewolf, a player can be on either the "good" or the "evil" team. This is not a very helpful distinction, however, because players will almost always publicly claim to be on the majority team. Adding finer distinctions makes it easier to make claims without revealing your identity.

Blood on the Clocktower has developed a meta of "three-for-three," where players initially claim one of three roles to narrow it down later. Tracking one unique role per player is already difficult; tracking three seems pointless for the player receiving the information and mostly serves to say you claimed the correct role early without revealing it. A simpler alternative is making claims based on power category, such as "I wake during the night" or "I don't receive any information." These serve the same purpose as a three-for-three but are easier to remember than three individual claims.

A category explicitly built into Blood on the Clocktower is the distinction between role types: Townsfolk, Outsiders, Minions, and Demons. Good players can be either "Townsfolk" who have useful abilities or "Outsiders" who have harmful abilities. Since some roles affect the number of outsiders that should be in play, learning who the Outsiders are becomes a crucial piece of the puzzle in every game.

When you define categories for roles to fall into, it becomes easy to create meaningful puzzles for players by providing minimal information, such as how many players belong to a category or that exactly one of two players is in a category. Defining categories creates the vocabulary you need to make deduction puzzles that enrich the game.

When making a social deduction game, as with any other game, players will develop their own chunking systems. You can help them along by naming the categories yourself. This will help them keep track of the information flying around more easily, allowing you to build more complex gameplay.