The entertainment industry is driven by hits that form trends. When a property is successful, a raft of imitators usually follows. A textbook example is the Marvel Cinematic Universe and other studios attempting to create shared universes. The games industry is no different. World of Warcraft began an MMO craze. Defense of the Ancients (DOTA) started a MOBA craze, and Player Unkown’s Battlegrounds began a battle-royale trend.
I began freelancing in tabletop game design when Indie Boards & Cards released the Resistance. It was the first social deduction game to crack the ‘player elimination problem’ that bedeviled its predecessor: Are You a Werewolf? (also known as Mafia). What followed was years of designers trying to create the next big social deduction hit, driven in large part because publishers were hungry to add social deduction games to their lineup to compete with The Resistance. So I cut my teeth on designing social deduction games and managed to get a number of them published: Bitten, Red Scare, and The 3 Laws of Robotics.
With Among Us’s popularity, I predict there will be a boom of social deduction video games similar to tabletop gaming. At RustBit Studio, we’re deep in developing a social deduction FPS called Grip of Madness. For those interested in designing your own social deduction game, I have some loose rules learned from years of game development in the genre, with lessons learned from pitfalls in my work.
Plan what happens when the traitor is discovered.
Note: Most social deduction games feature a ‘betrayer’ whose identity is hidden. The player with this identity is usually working against a larger group. For simplicity, I will be using the word traitor for this role.
You may be wondering why I’m bringing up the end-game as my first rule. It’s because it’s essential. So many design implications stem from deciding what to do when the traitor’s identity becomes known. Ask yourself the following questions:
- Does the game continue when the traitor’s identity is revealed, or does it end and proceed to some form of scoring?
- Does the traitor lose if they are discovered, or can they still win?
- Does the nature of the gameplay change after the traitor is found, or do they remain the same?
Keep in mind that most social deduction games build tension as long as the traitor’s identity remains obfuscated. Not knowing who to trust is the critical element that makes this genre exciting. Once the traitor is ‘outed,’ most games fizzle quickly — plan for what happens when your game hits this point. I recommend bringing the game to a conclusion somewhat quickly. The reason for this is to avoid these common pitfalls:
- The tension of the social deduction has evaporated, and without some form of game mechanic change, most games can’t support a one-versus-many structure for long.
- If the traitor is not eliminated from the game outright, they are effectively ‘eliminated’ when no other players want to cooperate with them.
- Sometimes which side will win is a foregone conclusion once the traitor is discovered. It’s not fun to wait for the inevitable to play out.
Your goal is to make sure all the players continue to have fun ever after the traitor is discovered, and this includes the traitor! Put yourself in every players’ role and make sure their game arc is satisfying to the end, whether or not the traitor is discovered.
Keep the victory conditions simple.
Most social deduction games function best with a very simple, “If X happens, the traitor wins. If Y happens, the other players win.” Simple victory conditions give the players an easy metric to measure player actions. For example, activities that work towards X make a player look like a traitor, and a traitor can take steps working towards Y to seem more trustworthy.
It’s easy to be tempted away from simple victory conditions, even I have strayed. In my game Bitten, players try to control areas with monsters matching their faction while keeping their faction a secret. I was running into a problem when players tried to take control too aggressively and essentially ‘outed’ their faction early in the game. It made for an unsatisfying arc. I should have created a release valve to end the game early in such cases. What I did instead was bolted on new rules and mechanics. In addition to the area control, I gave each player a lair. They could win by having the right monsters in their lair but would lose if the wrong monsters were in their lair. Sound a bit complicated? Well, it was. Veteran players were able to manage it, but less so first-timers. New players struggled to judge veteran player moves accurately, and the game suffered.
Components for the game Bitten. The factions were Vampires, Zombies, and Werewolves. Bitten, get it?
So when you are designing your victory conditions, make sure you can sum it up in a sentence or two (max). Try to make sure you don’t create edge case scenarios to papering over problems that arise when things don’t go according to plan.
So when you are designing your victory conditions, make sure you can sum it up in a sentence or two (max). Try to make sure you don’t create edge case scenarios as a means of papering over problems that arise when things don’t go according to plan.
Don’t excessively decouple actions from outcomes.
Social deduction games need mechanisms in place to obfuscate the misdeeds of the traitor. A traitor must hide behind random chance, unknown variables, and honest mistakes. Decoupling player actions from outcomes in some way: shuffling in random cards, allowing for the traitor to nullify player actions, hiding information, etc. Be aware that this layer of obfuscation can sometimes make it difficult for non-traitor players to know what steps they need to perform to win.
I believe this is the major pitfall I ran into on my game, Red Scare. The victory condition is simple enough: Exonerate members of your faction, and deport members of the opposite faction. How did players go about doing this? Well, they have to build a set of cards they can’t read. They do this by asking other players with decoder glasses to read their cards. Then they can trade those cards with other players. Once they made a set, they chose to exonerate or deport the entire hand of cards. But they couldn’t split the cards up. Sound a bit complicated? Well, it was. Once again, veteran players managed it, but less so first-timers. New players struggled to work towards their victory condition, which made them feel frustrated when they lost.
So when you’re developing the game mechanics of what players will be doing to work towards their victory conditions, make sure that their actions aren’t too decoupled from the outcome. This is best done through a playtesting method: Play the game without the traitor role. Alternatively, you can assign yourself the traitor role and all your playtesters the non-traitor role. Do not take any actions to hinder the other players. Your goal is to see how quickly and easily the players can understand what they need to do to win. If players struggle to win without a traitor working against them, your mechanisms are too decoupled or obfuscated.
Break these rules!
Let me be clear here; there are no holy rules in game design. I have found these rules to be helpful for myself when developing social deduction games. Your mileage may vary.
To this day, I continue to learn things about social deduction games. My work on The Grip of Madness has changed how I approach social deduction game design, as designing for the genre in a video game presents unique challenges not present in a tabletop game. Next time I’ll offer more specialized tips and tricks for creating social deduction games in the digital space.
Questions? Comments? Join us on our Discord. You can also follow RustBit or me on Twitter.
