The other day I was digging around and stumbled upon an undocumented feature for the (somewhat) new rule-based configuration released with Sitecore 9.

You can append -{number} to the role definition (in <appSettings> in Web.config) and it will work as both the full role name and without the -{number} part, e.g. ContentManagement-1 works as both ContentManagement and ContentManagement-1.

Web.config:

<cofiguration>
    <appSettings>
        <!-- The standard way -->
        <setting name="role:define" value="ContentManagement" />

        <!-- Numbered version -->
        <setting name="role:define" value="ContentManagement-1" />
    </appSettings>
</configuration>

Any Sitecore config patch file:

<configuration>
   <sitecore>
       <settings>
           <!-- Both approaches below will work with 'ContentManagement-1' role -->
           <setting name="my.setting" value="1234" role:require="Content-Management" />
           <setting name="my.setting" value="1234" role:require="Content-Management-1" />
       </settings>
    </sitecore>
</configuration>

It's nothing too special and nothing you couldn't do before, but it's a bit simpler to configure if you have multiple servers with the same role, where one specific server needs specific settings - e.g. if only the primary CM server should have some feature enabled.