How to Vig 101

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How to Vig 101

Postby S0me0ne23 » Sat May 18, 2019 12:04 pm

How to Vig 101, aka how not to consecutively shoot villas
I would like to go over the mechanical aspects of playing vigilante. Specifically in the context of a vanilla setup.

Who not to shoot.
I get it, you want to be a hero and vig that widely townread player. But seriously, could you not? If you shoot any random person, and they end up flipping town, you are helping the wolves. So the first priority of vig play needs to be avoiding being harmful. Playing vigilante poorly is sort of like random lynching, except you don't get the benefit of doing VCA afterwards, and sometimes you can make it harder to do NKA, if it becomes obscured who the maf kill was. Additionally, if all you do is vig your top scumread, you are claiming vig. Expect to be nightkilled.

What is the role of the vigilante?
Ideally, the vigilante acts as an extra lynch for town. This means that you need to take a more utilitarian approach to vig shots. Instead of thinking "Who am I scumreading?", you should be thinking "Who does town benefit from being killed?" Since vig shots don't show wagons, you are essentially a worse lynch. The plus side of this is that it means town doesn't need to waste a lynch on an outed wolf, as it is your job to take care of them, and there can still be a lynch, which leads to more discussion and the game progressing. But obviously not every night will there be an outed wolf.
Consider a typical day phase. There should be two main wagons at end of day. If there aren't, you need to interpret well beforehand whether it's due to maf bussing (usually implies a self-hammer), or Dead Air, Dead Villager. So I'm going to give village the benefit of the doubt and say they are forming actual wagons at end of day and not just afking. That being said, there were two wagons, right? If it's a maf flip, then yeah, you're just hunting for who has associations with the wolf. But if there's a village flip, then there's a distinctive lack of information. It's hard to do VCA without knowing whether the wagons were v/w or v/v. So that makes it simple, shoot the counterwagon!

Choosing Your Shot
The idea of resolving players is important here resolving players gives town information on lynch, specifically whether it's a mislynch or not. When you shoot the counterwagon, what you're doing is making up for the inherent information deficiency of vigilante by using it in a way that gives information. I would argue this is the go-to, or fundamental way to play vigilante. This also reduces the risk of outing yourself by shooting your tinfoil. ;)
Just to drive the point home, if there's a widely scumread villager, it is to town's detriment to not kill them right away. This is because if they get lynched eventually, it is to town's benefit to kill them earlier. Putting off a mislynch is about the worst thing you can do, since you're both allowing the mislynch to happen eventually, as well as denying town valuable information.
But what if you're really town reading the counterwagon? Well, you can make an argument to not vig them. What this means is that you don't intend to have them lynched/vig. As in ever. If you read my last topic in FM discussion, there are two ways to resolve a player: lynch them, or lock them as town. Well, this would be the second. This means that you're prepared to push the worldview that the player is town, and that they should be accepted as such. (Remember that if they get lynched anyways, there was no point in not vigging them.) So instead of vigging them, you get a little bit more freedom on who to vig. By a little bit, I do not mean take a hero shot. Shoot a hot-topic scumread.

TL;DR so far
Don't shoot your tinfoil. Shoot the person town has accepted as a wolf (Generally the counterwagon).
Town agenda is more important than your individual reads.
You're shooting every night that you have a shot.

Part the Second: Vig Cover
I don't intend to go to far in depth but I'll go over a couple of basic points:
  1. Don't out yourself as vig or not vig. (lesson over)
  2. If you're going to vig somebody, don't list them as your top scumread.
  3. If you're a cit, don't make it obvious that you're not the vig.
  4. Reacting to the vig shot as really good/bad outs you as not vig.
  5. If you make it obvious that you don't know who the vig shot is, you're claiming cit.
  6. Don't talk about the nightkill unless it is obvious who the vig shot is.
  7. If it's not obvious who the nightkill is, the vigilante is bad.
  8. If you're vigilante, don't try to "out yourself as cit".
  9. Reminder: WIFOM is bad.
  10. If you're going to fakeclaim vig as citizen, please have the decency to get yourself nightkilled.
  11. If you're vig and see a fakeclaim you either have to vig the person or hope they get nightkilled.
  12. Vig claims are self-resolving as long as vigilantes have shots.
  13. Don't bother reacting to a vig claim. If you do, you're claiming cit.
  14. Don't even think of fakeclaiming if the vigilante has limited shots.
  15. Ideally, if you fakeclaim, a mafia gets lynched instead of you. Otherwise it's probably not worth it.
  16. If there is already a vig claim don't fakeclaim vig.
  17. If you claim vig, you need to say who you're shooting tonight. :^)
Last edited by S0me0ne23 on Sun May 19, 2019 6:06 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: How to Vig 101

Postby TrueGent » Sun May 19, 2019 12:36 am

S0me0ne23 wrote:Reacting to the vig shot as really good/bad outs you as not vig.

Can you put this in like bolded size 400 font for me thanks
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Re: How to Vig 101

Postby S0me0ne23 » Sun May 19, 2019 12:42 am

TrueGent wrote:
S0me0ne23 wrote:Reacting to the vig shot as really good/bad outs you as not vig.

Can you put this in like bolded size 400 font for me thanks

"You can only use font sizes up to 200."
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Re: How to Vig 101

Postby TrueGent » Sun May 19, 2019 12:45 am

S0me0ne23 wrote:
TrueGent wrote:
S0me0ne23 wrote:Reacting to the vig shot as really good/bad outs you as not vig.

Can you put this in like bolded size 400 font for me thanks

"You can only use font sizes up to 200."

Damn close enough
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Re: How to Vig 101

Postby Kmenx » Sun May 19, 2019 12:56 am

TrueGent wrote:
S0me0ne23 wrote:Reacting to the vig shot as really good/bad outs you as not vig.

Can you put this in like bolded size 400 font for me thanks

Reacting to vig shot to jebait mafia POG
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Re: How to Vig 101

Postby GrumpyGoomba » Sun May 19, 2019 1:43 am

What if the vig reacts to their own shot to not out themselves? Camouflage.
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Re: How to Vig 101

Postby ICECLIMBERS » Sun May 19, 2019 6:13 am

what if you don’t vig anybody to keep your perfect record of never vigging Town :WeSmart:
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Re: How to Vig 101

Postby Chemist1422 » Sun May 19, 2019 6:31 am

Kmenx wrote:
TrueGent wrote:
S0me0ne23 wrote:Reacting to the vig shot as really good/bad outs you as not vig.

Can you put this in like bolded size 400 font for me thanks

Reacting to vig shot to jebait mafia POG

GrumpyGoomba wrote:What if the vig reacts to their own shot to not out themselves? Camouflage.

S0me0ne23 wrote:If you're vigilante, and don't try to "out yourself as cit".
mist ~ she/her

i guess this is goodbye?
(still here for danganronpa i guess)


stop sending reports to me i'm not a tos game moderator
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Re: How to Vig 101

Postby Kmenx » Sun May 19, 2019 9:24 am

S0me0ne23 wrote:Vig claims are self-resolving as long as vigilantes have shots.


Can we like put this to the OP of every single game that can roll vig?
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Re: How to Vig 101

Postby S0me0ne23 » Sun May 19, 2019 6:05 pm

Chemist1422 wrote:
Kmenx wrote:
TrueGent wrote:
S0me0ne23 wrote:Reacting to the vig shot as really good/bad outs you as not vig.

Can you put this in like bolded size 400 font for me thanks

Reacting to vig shot to jebait mafia POG

GrumpyGoomba wrote:What if the vig reacts to their own shot to not out themselves? Camouflage.

S0me0ne23 wrote:If you're vigilante, and don't try to "out yourself as cit".

I was about to post the exact same thing.
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Re: How to Vig 101

Postby ICECLIMBERS » Sun May 19, 2019 7:02 pm

if the vig shoots me can i say that it was a bad shot
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Re: How to Vig 101

Postby GrumpyGoomba » Sun May 19, 2019 10:54 pm

What if vig shoots the host?
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Re: How to Vig 101

Postby EvilDeanius0 » Mon Jun 10, 2019 1:29 am

S0me0ne23 wrote:Don't shoot your tinfoil.

But what if the town is dumb and doesn't lynch said tinfoil? How else am I supposed to win?
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Re: How to Vig 101

Postby GrumpyGoomba » Mon Jun 10, 2019 2:53 am

Vigis should be allowed to vig themselves... makes it more realistic that way.
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Re: How to Vig 101

Postby TheWabbit » Mon Jun 10, 2019 3:20 am

EvilDeanius0 wrote:
S0me0ne23 wrote:Don't shoot your tinfoil.

But what if the town is dumb and doesn't lynch said tinfoil? How else am I supposed to win?

there are always exceptions
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Re: How to Vig 101

Postby ryanyb » Mon Jun 17, 2019 6:13 am

oh man ive got like 10 minutes so yea

Something to keep in mind especially in light of the small-town game that just finished up is that it's not anti-town to question your reads and other people's reads. If a certain set of reads has been continuously fucking people over or players x and y have just had awful reads for the entire game and they're not changing the way they go about actually producing content then hey maybe you should take a step back and spend an hour or so re-evaluating things and trying to look at things from a non-influenced point of view.

There's a really fine line with vig where you need to both be correct and be taking the most optimal shot for the game. Consider the last time I rolled vig in the SMAS game and hero shot someone. It was the most correct shot in the sense that if I had told the game I was shooting gent then I would have been killed, and I really didn't want to die since I'd solved the game. It was not the optimal shot though since combining the shot with real life circumstances which led to lesser activity in the following day, my shot looked like the mafia shot and thus I died. Which was a huge rip. You want every shot to get closer to making the game obviously solvable from a point of view larger than your own unless you're hard confirmed vig (which in this case I thought I was but hey apparently that didn't work out so well).

Also how exactly you actually play vigilante varies by setup. Some setups expect the vig to shoot n1 every time, some setups expect n2 shots every time, etc. Most of the games we run on this site have very open vig play imo but some of the smaller setups that take place are balanced around the vig shooting n1 or n2. And in those situations, it's not imperative that you actually hit scum, but it is incredibly important that your shot either confirms a given world (a world being one way to separate the players into town/scum) or disproves the existence of a popular world. This doesn't mean shoot the medic. But maybe if everyone's reads are hinging around x player being scum then x player is a good shot.

Obviously the above rule doesn't quite hold if you need to salvage the game or else its a big rip. You don't need to be a hero, you need to make the game as obvious for as many players as possible with exceptions being the rare cases in which you have a pretty confirmed mafia and you've taken a step back to re-evaluate the game to make sure you're not about to just lose for town.

Like 80% of the time at least it's better to take the safe but widely agreed upon (from town) shot than the weird ass tin foil that is going to obviously out you as the vigilante the moment the shot lands.
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