Lie to survive in Trouble in Terrorist Town

The round begins and I'm designated “Traitor”. This is it: from now on, it's my job to act naturally, gain confidence, kill everyone and hide the evidence. Oh god, this must be how those Russian Spies felt. The pressure is enormous.

Trouble in Terrorist Town is a brutal Garry's Mod gamemode. When a round starts, a few Traitors are selected from the group of players. Aside from the pair of Detectives the game assigns, anyone could be a killer in disguise. The Traitors know who everyone is, and need to play on the trust and mistrust of the group to their advantage: human nature in this sort of situation, backed up with firepower, tends to make things end badly. You almost don't need to do anything, but it's more fun when you do.

Betraying people isn't as easy as you think. You need to not be seen, which means following people while looking innocent. How do you look innocent in Gmod? You don't look at people too much, you holster your gun, you give up prime opportunities to kill an innocent in the hope that they'll back you up when the accusations start flying.

And after the first body is discovered, if you haven't set it on fire to hide the evidence, the accusations fly: “Who was last with him?” “Buck's the traitor!” “No I'm not, stop trying to get me killed. Why would you do that? You're the traitor”. And on and on it goes. Bodies are discovered, people get twitchy, instead of accusing, they shoot first, killing the person they suspected. If someone sees that happen, well they might think he's the Traitor.

When a player dies, you can inspect the body. It tells you how long ago they died, useful for finding a body in a room and hunting down the person nearest to them. It also tells you what gun was used to kill them. Swap guns? Yeah, as long as the other Traitor isn't using the replacement weapon to take the targets down.

Detectives are the only Innocents you can trust to not be Traitors. They're able glean more info from the body than the regular players: if they get to it quickly enough, they can scan the DNA and will get the name of the player. They're also able to discover the last person the victim saw. Important? What if they were shot in the back, and happened to be looking at someone else. As a Traitor, if they're not in the game, it gets a whole lot easier to mess with people.

All the while the Innocents are going nuts. They don't want to be left alone, for fear of being picked off, but if you meet up with someone, do you know they're not the killer? Tactically, people tend to gather in group, but there can be as many as four Traitors. I've giggled as one player vocally thanked God that he'd found a group, only for us all to bicker over who gets to kill him first. It's that cruel

Deceitful deathmatch? Brilliant.

All you need to get it working is right here: http://ttt.badking.net/ , but Garry's Mod is also set-up to download everything you need. You can search for the game mode on theserver browser, or just order the maps. Trouble in Terrorist Town maps start with the 'ttt' prefix. Get lying!

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