Blood on the Clocktower, software development and making life decisions

I played a game the other day called Blood on the Clocktower. It’s a social deduction game where a team of good townsfolk needs to kill a demon to win. It’s similar to other social deduction games like Secret Hitler or The Resistance.

One big difference is that Blood on the Clocktower has a storyteller who controls some aspects of the game. For example, the storyteller chooses what information each player receives, based on their character’s abilities and effects.

At one point during the game, my friend Sam — the storyteller — made a mistake. According to the rules, a certain ability should have proced, giving us some potentially false information (because the character was poisoned. But instead, the ability didn’t proc at all. The fact that nothing happened was a clear sign that the character was poisoned — something that would have been much less obvious if the ability had proced as normal.

When I asked about it later, Sam said:

You have to make a choice and stick to it.

That mindset really stuck with me.

What I found striking was that Sam didn’t have to double down on that decision. He could have admitted to a one-time mistake, restarted the game, or tried to patch it somehow. Instead, he accepted what had happened and committed to it.

Part of why that worked is the scope of the situation: at worst, we were only affecting one timeboxed game. But more importantly, Sam avoided the biggest danger — the mental load of second-guessing your own decisions. That load can be overwhelming. I’ve seen it happen to others, and I’ve felt it myself.

In software development, we fail fast, iterate quickly, timebox work and retrospect. We accept mistakes as part of the process and move forward.

What about life? What practices do we have to keep ourselves from being paralyzed by doubt and mistakes?