Great topic and exploration. I’m far less into social deduction games, and my partner (who is part of my main play group) hates them!
Makes me wonder if it’s possible to have a collaborative social deduction game? There would need to be some automation, perhaps via cards like Trogdor. I’m imagining a deck of NPC action cards, some more powerful than others, or having more resources (like the devil has more gold). The action deck is shuffled and split into 3 representing 3 NPCs, any of whom could be the traitor. I particularly like the idea of a twisted advisor to the king, so perhaps the players are the king’s children/servants/knights/other who know one of the advisors is a crook, but aren’t sure who. They work together to ‘listen in’ on the advisors (by revealing cards from their deck) and after a certain number of turns must guess who the traitor is. I’ll need to do more thinking on what exactly is on cards and how to make it actually deductible for players, but I like the concept haha
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Offloading the social deduction element to NPCs could be a really interesting solution to that discomfort. You could turn to (non-social) deduction games for inspiration; Clue (aka Cluedo) is the big one, but I really enjoy more modern takes on it like Herbalism and The Search for Planet X.
Or, you could set up those NPCs in a GM situation, so that the social deduction is filtered through the GM's discretion. Maybe you'd get more distance from lying right to each other if it's just one of the characters someone is playing that's lying?