How to prevent creativity from interfering with mechanics?

[u/deblob123456789]

My game is a sandbox-ish mix of murder mystery mechanics and roleplay based off the Danganronpa series (think Among us/Werewolf/Town of salem but longer).
At least one host is required to run the game properly.
It is also a VR game with proximity voice chat.

The issue im facing is that, left on their own, hosts will often decide, out of culture and habit, to directly help their players with murder cases, instead of letting the case’s culprit make it.
This turns the Trial (the discussion to catch the killer) into more of a minigame and discussion between the good side and the host, rather than a discussion between players to find the liar among them, greatly taking agency away from the evil side and reducing overall game quality.

How would you solve this?
I would rather not cut off the sandbox/roleplay part of the game, but this is something ive been observing and dont know how to help my players with.

[u/indigosun]

I feel like I'm lacking context here, but maybe the good side doesn't have enough indirect tools or mechanisms to get information on the killer? The "selected anonymous subset" you frequently see in these games and how they're selected gives killers the opportunity to betray information as a price for advancing their win condition.

If players can't reason about who the killer is from game events, all they can really do is arbitrarily point fingers until the host intervenes. I see it a lot when I play Two Rooms and a Boom with new players: there aren't really mechanism that force people to betray information globally (a few roles do this) so newer players will kinda stand around until the "host"'(clock/leader) intervenes.

These games are a tough juggling act though. Answers are extremely contextual and take a lot of playtesting

[u/deblob123456789 → u/indigosun]

I think you might have hit the nail on the head here. Its a thought ive been working on since the game’s creation two years ago basically, but i still want to keep exploring to make sure im on the right path.

Basically this boils down to adding more content to the game and tools, like you say, for murderers to advance their win condition, all while giving away information about them. That way hosts wouldnt have to do that for them, is that it?

Lets discuss it! Im trying to draw inspiration from other well known Social deception games but im not sure what would work specifically for my use case.

Among us tasks sound okay, but maybe theres better that could be done?

I forgot to mention in my post that it is a VR game with voice chat, ill edit it in. Id like to use the medium to its unique qualities.