Trust Tells

At its baseline, we define a trust tell as the invocation of a game-transcending promise that a specific action makes the invoker town, without there being any other strategic reason for that action to exist as a part of gameplay. To be clear, it doesn’t matter if the action is truly clearing or what your alignment is when you invoke it. To quote our angleshooting rules: a good rule of thumb is if you're attempting to push a game in a particular direction, and your reasons for doing so are not based on what's directly happened in the game, or meta, you're in the danger zone.

An easy example: a player explicitly states "I am town" as only the town alignment over multiple games and makes sure other players know that this statement is 100% alignment-indicative, so that this player always becomes an Innocent Child or outed mafia in every game they play.

What constitutes the invocation of an outside structure in a game promise isn’t always so clear-cut. Saying "I promise I'm town" and referencing your past meta is fine. However, saying "I have intentionally reserved this action to be 100% trustable" invokes a type of external honor structure that applies to one alignment differently than the other and becomes a trust tell. You can’t set up an action to confirm yourself as a villager for reasons unrelated to gameplay and then invoke it in an attempt to clear yourself.

In cases where the line between trust telling and normal gameplay becomes murky, it will ultimately come down to whether something falls outside the spirit of the game. If you’re unsure whether something you want to post in a game constitutes a trust tell, privately ask a moderator before posting it. If you believe someone else may have trust told, report it and moderators will take a look at it.