Is it ever advantageous to pretend to be the "hidden" team if you are on the majority team?

Question

According to this BoardGameGeek post, it is never advantageous for a “good” character to pretend to be part of the “bad” team in a social deduction game.

every. single. time. you explain these kinds of games, you need to hammer the point home that it makes absolutely no sense to pretend you're a spy/fasist/werewolf/whatever when you're in fact a villager/good guy/liberal.

Talking specifically about The Resistance and The Resistance: Avalon (since they are more or less the same game), the "hidden" Loyalists are expected to pretend to be Resistance members and the "hidden" Evil characters are expected to pretend to be Good characters, respectively.

Is it ever advantageous to pretend to be on the a Resistance member and pretending to be a Loyalist, or being a Good person and pretending to be Evil? Or is this person correct: it is never worthwhile?

Answer 1

Specific games can differ, but generally in games like these the "bad team" all know the members of the bad team. Therefore pretending to be a bad guy only decieves your allies, and convinces everyone that you are their enemy.

Neither of those will help you. You're harming your allies' ability to make accurate judgments while not affecting your enemies, and you're making our so that no one will listen to you.

Answer 2

As has already been pointed out in most of these types of games the bad side already knows who is on their team so the only people you will fool is the people on your team.

However a key point that was not mentioned in a lot of these games it is also against the for a good player to do to much for the evil side. For example in the resistance series of games the key thing a player can do is to vote to succeed or fail a mission. Good players only have the option to vote for success while bad players can vote for either. If at any point a good player does vote for failure the good team instantly losses the game.

Now that being said the key thing to remember about the evil team knowing who all the evil players are is that they can easily setup a situation where a good player pretending to play evil can end up making one or more evil players look good which will easily help evil win.

As note to that there are cases where I have been playing those games on the evil side and made a mistake to out myself as evil and when that happens I have been able to turn that to my advantage by focusing my attention on a good player who looked evil and working to make them look even more evil which ends up making some evil players look good.

Answer 3

Talking specifically about The Resistance and The Resistance: Avalon, is it ever advantageous to pretend to be on the bad team if you are on the good team?

Yes, in fact the whole point of the game is that the evil Resistance has the Loyalists so outnumbered that the Loyalists have to pretend to be part of the Resistance. In the standard game, one would to work had to contrive a situation in which it is beneficial to a Resistance member to pretend to be a Loyalist. For instance, if you think the Loyalists have forgotten who the other Loyalists are, or you'e worried that one of the Resistance will try a "let's intentionally send Loyalists on a mission to expose them" strategy. With standard assumptions about other players, it does not make sense for the Resistance to pretend to be Loyalists.

In Avalon, it's more complicated, as both teams lack complete knowledge about who is on their team. This makes situations where it's advantageous for Merlin's team to pretend to be on Mordred's slightly less contrived, but still unlikely.

Answer 4

This has happened in my matches. When someone is resilient but simulates being a spy, the game is completely messed up, especially if there are roles that do not absolutely know the loyalty of certain people. So yes, the person who is good should NEVER pretend to be evil, because it will not bring any advantage to your team, only confusion!