On the one hand, there are plenty of scenarios in which suiciding for the sake of town is a good idea. You
want
to suicide to protect a claimed cop, as an obvious example. As Antihero alluded to in #4, most setups that employ a bodyguard do so because there's some sort of powerful role or roles where having a plain protective role instead of a bodyguard might imbalance or even break the setup in some way, so usually in those setups bodyguard has some use and it's not just suiciding for the sake of suiciding. I'm also of the opinion that someone who is generally thought of as lynchbait should ALWAYS use bodyguard on every single night. House (and people in general) need to stop conflating the idea of knowing one's own alignment with being "confirmed town". Yes, you are confirmed to yourself, but what good does that do if you're still in the lynch pool? You should want to sacrifice yourself to protect those who aren't in the lynch pool unless you have absolute confidence you won't be lynched and even then it's sometimes still a good idea.
... But on the other hand, I disagree with pretty much all of CFJ's counter-points in this thread. Bodyguard is not stronger than a doctor and pretty much never is. Flipping and being "confirmed" is not necessarily a good thing for the game (being dead is, in general, a really shit thing to be). People in general do not listen to the reads of dead players (and even if they did, I would strongly recommend against this in the case of a bodyguard, so the point is moot). And, most importantly, the argument that dying and confirming yourself as town is a good thing is ridiculous unless you were in the lynch pool to begin with - you don't need to confirm yourself if you're never going to be lynched anyway (and as much as you can argue that it's conceited to think you'll never be lynched and that everyone is lynchable unless they're confirmed, that's really not the case)...
Really, the only time I think you should be using a bodyguard role is if you're protecting someone who is objectively of more worth to town (e.g. a claimed power role or someone who is actually confirmed/not in the lynch pool) or if you're in the lynch pool yourself (though people's judgment about this in general can be a bit off, so this isn't something I'd trust any random-player-who-rolled-bodyguard to decide, which makes this more idealistic than realistic but whatever). Outside of that, I don't think there's any net gain for town that outweighs the value of clarity (knowing for sure who was targeted for a kill).
Funny that you should mention that... The only time I've ever been killed by a vig was when PV was a vig in Tales Of You and killed me. It turns out that the bodyguard in that game (Mac) was pretty much tossing a coin between protecting me and someone else and ended up choosing someone else, but it could have very easily ended up with the bodyguard protecting from the vig kill.In post 72, GreyICE wrote:If you bodyguard the person the vig shoots then there was the sort of severe error on someone's part that means that the town deserves to lose.
I've also seen it happen in other games (e.g. the recently finished Queen of Hearts game), so while it's rare, it does happen. And while it probably does indicate a severe error on someone's part, it still happens.