Any character can just put on a disguise and bring "justice", but what would bring a player to pick the Vigilante instead of another class?
I remember reading an example, back in Examplars of Evil, about a princess (aristocrat/rogue) acting normally by day and murdering people by night as the White Lady, mostly because her younger brother accessed to the throne before her. So the concept of the Vigilante went from purely flavorful to an actual game mecanic.
In the end though, what makes the vigilante what it is? Its Social or its Vigilante identity?
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Any character can just put on a disguise and bring "justice", but what would bring a player to pick the Vigilante instead of another class?
I remember reading an example, back in Examplars of Evil, about a princess (aristocrat/rogue) acting normally by day and murdering people by night as the White Lady, mostly because her younger brother accessed to the throne before her. So the concept of the Vigilante went from purely flavorful to an actual game mecanic.
In the end though, what makes the vigilante what it is? Its Social or its Vigilante identity?
Mechanically, the reason it's chosen is because it's can be a full-bab character with 6 + INT skill ranks, a favoured will save and just as many useful class abilities as a fighter - without Advanced Weapon Training, there's almost no reason to pick Fighter. So I guess the Vigilante identity? But you don't even need to use the identities as different if you want, so fundamentally it's just an individual choice for each vigilante.
Neither, which I guess boils down to social identity. You can play a great Vigilante without ever switching forms, but to get more of your features, you need to treat it as your social identity.
Players pick Vigilante because it's a skill monkey martial with a good will save and useful, flexible talents. I'd say that the choice between bonus damage with Weapon Finesse and bonus AC with Power Attack is a little more representative of what makes the class cool, alongside the social talent for +4 to a mental-based skill, scaling to multiple skills.
Additionally, the archetypes are very flexible. They cover many major class types, allowing the class to cover a lot of different concepts.