Misinformation in Blood on the Clocktower: Deep Dive
Or: Why You're Wrong About Everything
Good evening class, today's lecture is on the various types of misinformation in BotC.
This was ported over from a thread I originally dumped my thoughts into on discord. The discord is public, in case you have any reason to look through the original thread. Hope you enjoy!
First of all, if you’re not familiar with Blood on the Clocktower, go fix that, and second, this will assume you either 1) have encyclopedic knowledge of all characters in the game like I do, or 2) can just look up what you don’t know. I’ve also hyperlinked the first mention of each character when possible. I’ll also assume you have a basic understanding of the base rules of the game.
Chart Intro & Exploration
To begin: you'll be seeing charts that look something like this a lot so I'll start by explaining it.
This represents the misinfo that a particular character (in this case, the Baron) yields over time. Each column is a player, each row is a night/day cycle, with night/day 1 at the top, increasing as it goes down. As you can see, the Baron doesn't provide any misinfo of its own. Shocking. I’ll be using some letters to represent different states, so here’s a key:
P: Poisoned/Drunk (either)
V: False info
M: Misregistration
X: Dead
N: Nonconformist misinfo
G: Goon (it’s unique :p)
As an example, here’s Puzzlemaster’s chart:
We’ll see another chart for PM later, but this one is an example of what it might look like in a single game. Someone is droisoned (i.e. drunk or poisoned) for the entirety of the game. The left column will, in general, represent the perspective of the character or player we’re most interested in (usually the one listed at the top). Neighbors matter, and loop through the chart.
Let’s see a few more examples before diving in. A No Dashii poisons their neighbors for the whole game.
Poisoner is all over the place. It has arbitrary misinformation each night. We'll get to the implications of this soon enough.
Here's Drunk for completion's sake, though it's not very different from PM:
Vigormortis is interesting in how its misinfo is quite traceable.
I don’t intend to include this on most charts because it’s just not very relevant, but effects typically go away when the character dies.
Notably, Widow has more to it than its misinfo. It sees the Grimoire, allowing it to optimize its misinfo. And of course, here's Xaan, the very character that inspired the charts in the first place. Technically, the poison should miss other evil characters as well as Outsiders, but I’m not very interested in the particular details right now. We’ll be seeing a lot more of Xaan soon.
Vortox introduces a new type of misinformation: false info.
There’s not much “false info” in the game besides Vortox, but Fibbin is another example of it (for our intents and purposes, anyway). We’ll investigate false info later.
And finally (for now), we have misregistration. The charts aren’t really designed to illustrate misreg as well as the others, but I’ll address it in more detail later. Here’s Recluse, with Spy’s chart being identical:
Poison & Drunkenness
I'll be framing this discussion mostly in terms of information roles, but mechanical roles are relevant too, of course. "Poisoned" is defined in the following way:
A poisoned player has no ability but thinks they do, and the Storyteller acts like they do. If their ability would give them information, the Storyteller may give them false information. Poisoned players do not know they are poisoned.
"Drunk" is defined the same way. A "P" in a space means, for the most part, that any information received will be twisted to help the evil team as much as possible. Figuring out where these Ps are is often a critical part of how the good team wins the game, and if the Ps can stay hidden, the evil team will have a much easier time winning the game.
Now, how can the good team find these Ps? Well, it depends on the script. Obviously.
When it comes to Xaan for example, there's this push and pull between a horizontal row of Ps and the Outsider count. If the evil team can mask the outsider count, they can mask the Ps, which is why outsider bluffs are so incredibly potent on Xaan scripts.
However, the good team still has a decent sense of what the Ps will look at (including the world where they just don't exist): they will always be a horizontal row, and there will never be townsfolk that are excluded from the row.
We will assume that, excluding nonconformist abilities, the good team always understands the possible shapes that misinfo can take on. This yields some fun results.
Possibility Spaces & Misinformation Shapes
Before even pulling tokens from the bag, players know that Xaan poison is in one of these shapes:
In this case, it’s what I like to call “horizontal misinfo”. This is a possibility space chart, unlike the ones we’ve seen before. It’s very similar to before, except that it shows all possibilities at once, each grouped by a dotted box.
The fact that players know this going in has 2 major implications.
1: This is the full possibility space of who the Xaan can poison. I'm not including probabilities on this graph (e.g. Xaan 1 is more likely in 13p than Xaan 4), but these are the cells that could possibly be Xaan poisoned.
2: A P somewhere implies there are Ps elsewhere. If player 2 is poisoned on day 3, so are players 3 through 7.
Xaan is a wonderful example of this phenomenon, but not the only one. In fact, it stands out as an outlier because it’s horizontal.
Here’s the possibility space for Puzzlemaster:
It covers a lot of the same space, but now the droison is vertical, not horizontal. (Technically, the PM could make themself drunk, but it’s not very relevant).
Vertical misinfo is the norm in clocktower. If player 2 is drunk on day 1, they'll stay drunk on day 2, day 3, etc..
Deducing that a player is puzzledrunk has very different implications from deducing that a player is Xaan poisoned, even if we ignore the other aspects of those characters. So, what if Puzzlemaster and Xaan are on the same script? Let’s say you've solved that you have bad info on day 3. What does this mean?
It might be vertical, it might be horizontal. Both have huge implications that are wildly different from each other, and I think that's really cool, especially in a game with substantial puzzle elements.
Of course, BotC is designed so that you're unlikely to get to the point where you know for certain that you had bad info one day. Still, thinking concretely like this helps a ton when investigating worlds.
As an aside, one thing i love about BotC is how tight many of the designs are. Not only can you deduce who is poisoned when based on solving one bad piece of info, but both PM and Xaan add a lot of weight to that deduction. PM finds the demon, while Xaan solves outsider count. It's great!
Now.... let's take a look at Poisoner. This is what Poisoner's possibility space looks like:
I had to break my own convention just a tiny bit, but each row is an independent event, in which any column might be poisoned (much like any vertical misinfo).
Since a Poisoner can choose anyone, it's a pretty arbitrary form of misinfo by nature. Puzzlemaster is also arbitrary, but only in one dimension. The reason why Poisoner is so utterly devastating is that it's arbitrary on a night-by-night basis: it's 2-Dimensional misinfo.
This gives Poisoner scripts the property that, realistically, any info can be poisoned. Players are able to throw up their hands and build worlds where their info (or bluffed info) is wrong. Of course, only 1 player can be poisoned each night, so it’s not fully arbitrary, but since there’s so little connection across nights, players can conclude that they are poisoned on any given night. This is a healthy dynamic for Trouble Brewing to have, because beginners are prone to bluffing incorrectly. However, it is not a dynamic that can fit most scripts, and in fact it pushes most scripts outside the realm of solvability and into socials. This works for TB, but not most scripts.
Poisoner is the source of some of the only 2D misinfo in the entire game. Most things are vertical, with Xaan and Minstrel being horizontal. Misregistration (coming in a bit) is its own separate thing.
Quick aside about Minstrel: it's horizontal misinfo, but coming from a townsfolk. It also has Xaan-like implications (the recently executed player's a Minion), but it can junk an entire day of info. Ultimately it's still a townsfolk because that day is literally a bonus execution and nothing else has to matter, but it's still misinfo which makes it feel bad on info scripts.
False Information
Let's shift to another form of 2D misinfo, the Vortox:
Either everything is falsified, or nothing is.
Vortoxed info is strictly false. If solved for, the info can be inverted to find the truth. So, V's are weaker than P's: P's, if solved for, yield no info, while V's leave some info intact. How much info is left intact is dependent on the character. A Seamstress knows much more after solving that they were Vortoxed when they used their ability than a Dreamer does.
Regardless, the important part is that V's always leave some info intact, no matter how small. This allows for Vortox to be solvable despite affecting all townsfolk abilities. If you can find any V’s, you’ve found all of them, and they’re everywhere.
The following, for example, would be fully unsolvable. There are worlds where there is no info, meaning the game is pure socials.
The possibility space chart for our other V, the Fibbin, is as follows:
The chart isn’t perfect, but what’s important is that it's really devastating because the false info could be anywhere and at any time. That's pretty much as efficient as you can get. It's so little actual misinfo, but it's tied to absolutely nothing, so everything has a little bit of doubt thrown onto it. Which is a lot like Poisoner!
Most previously posted charts can be extended to their possibility space charts pretty easily. No Dashii is a fun exception, because if you ignore the wealth of shenanigans on Sects & Violets (which you would be justified to not ignore), the poison can only be in those places for the whole game.
Misregistration
…is really weird.
The glossary defines Register as the following:
A player that “registers as” a specific character or alignment counts as that character or alignment for game rule purposes, and for other player’s abilities. For example, if a good player “registers as evil,” they are still good (and win when good wins), but they count as evil to characters that detect evil. Registering as a character does not impart that character’s ability.
This puts the misinfo in an entirely new place: players who check you.
So, misreg is highly dependent on who you register to. I've seen plenty of games where recluses and spies never misregister to anyone, and that’s fine and normal. This means that misregistration is inherently somewhat swingy (good thing we have a "might" on those abilities).
Misregistration affects a semi-arbitrary subset of the Townsfolk in the game. They will usually know if it is possible that a particular player misregistered to them. For example, an Empath knows that only their living neighbors can misregister to them. A Chef will probably know if a Recluse might misregister to them, but not a Spy. This is because a recluse has a voice. That, however, is a topic for a different post.
Going through Trouble Brewing, we can see how most roles know who might have misregistered to them:
Washerwoman, Librarian, Investigator: either of their 2 pings may have misregistered
Chef: anyone might misregister
Empath: either of their alive neighbors at the time they get info
Fortune Teller, Ravenkeeper, Slayer: anyone they choose, at the time they choose them
Undertaker: anyone who's been executed, at the time they were executed
Virgin: the first player to nominate them, at the time they did so
Here are some other notable roles (still only having recluse or spy misregister):
Flowergirl: anyone who voted yesterday might misregister tonight
Town Crier: anyone who nominated yesterday might misregister tonight
Oracle: any dead player, on any night*
Bounty Hunter, Steward, Grandmother, Balloonist. etc.: anyone they see
Farmer, Pixie, Lycanthrope: anyone
Shugenja: anyone can, but most likely it'll only be their neighbors, or their neighbors
Recluse & Spy are the two “main” forms of misregistration we have at the moment, but there are still some more misregistration characters in the game.
To get it out of the way: Zombuul uses the word “register” in its ability text. However it really isn’t misinfo and isn’t relevant to this discussion.
Lycanthrope, Legion, and Revolutionary are the misregistration characters that remain. Most cases of misregistration from these characters closely mirror at least one of Recluse or Spy, so there isn’t much more to say about them. Here are their charts (a mix of normal charts and possibility space charts, based on what I think is more useful):
As we can see, Lycanthrope’s possibility space for its misregistration is huge. This is great as internal misinfo for the Lycanthrope, but not so great as global misregistration. TPI I’m begging you to fix this.
Nonconformist Misinformation
So far, we've seen droison, falsification, and misregistration. However, there’s another type of misinfo in BotC, and that’s when we throw our hands up and say anything is possible. That’s right, some characters don’t conform to the rules.
Our 3 culprits are Atheist, Wizard, and Amnesiac. Here are their charts (they’re all essentially identical):
The thing about nonconformist misinfo is that it can do ANYTHING, which makes games inherently unsolvable. Fortunately, BotC is run by a human Storyteller who, in theory, will keep the game solvable and fun. Each nonconformist character has its own way of doing this.
Amnesiac: this one's easy. Why are you using an Amnesiac to cause misinfo? Just don’t do that.
Wizard: wishes explicitly might (and probably will) leave clues to their nature. This gets the good team thinking about roughly the right possibility space, keeping some semblance of solvability.
Atheist: Storytellers should be leaving traces of the existence of the Atheist throughout the game. Additionally, the atheist has a voice to tell town about what kind of game it is.
These are some of the most well-loved characters in the game, but they only work when the Storyteller lets them work. Though, that’s probably a big part of why they’re so fun in the first place, right?
Additional Charts & Exploration
Well, that does it for the main course of this post. There’s still quite a bit to explore, though. Here’s a bunch of additional charts I found interesting, as well as extra thoughts:
Innkeeper’s chart is very similar to Sailor’s.
This works for Philosopher too, though that’s tied to the character more than the player:
Village Idiot has 3 different possible setups, which affect its bluffspace a lot. Evil can and should be taking advantage of it. They can bluff the wrong number of VIs (much like Xaan with outsiders) and push worlds where the droison is in a place it isn’t. VI leans hard into one of the big non-misinfo properties of droison: it's perfectly bluffable, so droisoned players can look evil sometimes.
Nonconformist info (e.g. Artist, Savant) interacts in a cool way with misinfo, and misregistration in particular. The reason I dislike combining nonconformist info and misreg so much is that you really don't know who might be misregistering to you. It's cool, but not very fun in my opinion. Artist can mitigate it somewhat, but Savant is way more Storyteller dependent.
Goon is super weird (and cool). It's got a lot of the properties of misregistration, but it actually causes droison! I've decided to give it its own letter. Because of the way it works, I think it makes a lot more sense to keep it under the misregistration umbrella than the droison umbrella. But, of course, it doesn't fit neatly into either.
Here’s another Poisoner-like setup:
See if you can tell what’s happening in this SnV game:
Sometimes misinfo can get out of hand. Too little, and a game is solved too easily. Too much, and you get something like this:
This is a great example of how the script isn’t always at fault when there’s too much misinfo (the Storyteller is). This situation is highly avoidable on Trouble Brewing… but on some scripts it isn’t. Anyways, here’s a chart for it:
Analyzing Homebrew
After all, why not? There’s misinformation in homebrew characters, too!
Emptyset’s Lies, Spies, and Eyes features the Tarantella, which is a unique form of misinfo tailored to the script.
Tarantella poison is applied via a player’s choice, just like Goon! However, it moves when this happens, and it can move multiple times in a night. The chart this generates is very unique. It may look arbitrary, even more so than Poisoner, but it’s more traceable than it looks because players know who they chose.
On a similar note, I have a homebrew of my own that involves moving poison:
One person in the original thread, ShadowSlam, had the idea for “diagonal misinfo”. As it turns out, this is absolutely possible, and seems quite fun! It’s showcased in his own Demon:
In the process of writing, I had another idea for a form of misinformation that isn’t quite represented anywhere I’ve seen:
Puncture (Minion): Once per game, at night, choose a Townsfolk: they & their Townsfolk neighbors receive false info for 3 nights & 3 days. [-1 Outsider]
ShadowSlam and I also had the idea for “triangular misinfo” (to add onto vertical, horizontal, and now square):
Triangulus (Demon): Each night, players in between you and the next clockwise Townsfolk from you receive false information. After day 4, evil wins.
As well as… parallelogrammical misinfo:
We also made a checkerboard. A fun thing about this one is that it needs an even number of Townsfolk to work properly, if it only checkers over Townsfolk. I find it very amusing to add [-1 or +1 Outsider] to this character in order to ensure an even number of Townsfolk.
One thing that’s important to note is that having too many directions of misinfo can hold a script back. If there are too many ways that anyone could have bad info, abilities become somewhat meaningless.
SuperGD’s Absolut also has an interesting chart.
Absolut (Demon): Townsfolk abilities yield false info except 1. Evil may (once) publicly guess who: if right, or after day 5, evil wins.
Finally, we’ll look at Elluna’s Miasma. It is another form of horizontal misinfo, much like Xaan, though it balances itself differently.
Miasma (Minion): Once per game, at night, choose that all Townsfolk are poisoned & get false information until dusk.
Closing Thoughts
Well, it’s getting late, and I’ve said just about all that I set out to say. Misinformation is a super fun way that BotC maintains its balance, and it’s been fun to dissect it and see what I could learn. It’s also very important to understand the different properties of different forms of misinfo when making custom content, whether that’s custom scripts or full-on homebrew. I’m sure there’s still more to say, but I have to call it at some point. Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed it! Here’s a little guy to brighten your day.
