Confused about multiple Engage/Vie for Position rolls

This is a spin-off from Leonides’ thread (“During Fight!: He doesn’t see me so I stab him in the face!”), but since it’s about an entirely other issue, I thought it best to start a new one.

In the thread, a situation is described where a person in the middle of a Fight wants to engage another enemy, one who is fighting someone else in the first place. This calls for an Engage roll, as everyone in the thread seems to agree on. However, I got confused about this as the suddenly outnumbered enemy is already making VfP rolls against his other opponent. In this case, is the beleagered opponent then required to make two rolls: first a new Engage roll to establish his distance with the new opponent, and then a VfP to see whether he gains advantage over his ‘old’ target?

The reason I’m asking is that I distinctly seem to remember that there’s only ever 1 positioning roll made per exchange, no matter how many opponents. But this situation, as far as I can see, cannot work with that 1 roll being either a Vie for Position or an Engage; it must be both at the same time for the mechanics to work - no?

The VfP roll is the engage roll :wink:

I’m not sure I understand. It would be possible to roll once and use that roll as the ‘base’ for both VfP and Engage, but since there’s a lot of modifiers to stack on (extra dice for longer stride, weapon length etc. for the Engage roll), it would quickly get messy. You would have to use separately colored dice to keep track of them. The only thing the two rolls share is that they’re both based on speed. In that case, you might as well roll twice, and only log the hardest test for advancement.

Is there something I’m completely misunderstanding?

EDIT: are you saying that the person who wants to engage another target mid-combat rolls VfP and not Engage? In that case, it would just be a straight Speed roll as there are no modifiers for dis/advantage, correct?

Vie and Engage both use Speed.
For the new opponent, compare weapon lengths with the target. If a test is still required, and the target has the longer weapon, roll the weapon length dice separately on the side.

-L

Thanks Luke, that does make sense.

EDIT: Here’s an example I did to sort it out in my head:

Knife and Polearm are fighting. Knife has the advantage for the upcoming VfP test. However, suddenly Sword Engages Polearm as well. Now, Knife rolls Speed+2d for advantage. Sword rolls Speed. Polearm rolls Speed and then separately rolls +1d (weapon length) that only counts against Sword. If Polearm had the advantage instead, Knife and Sword would roll Speed whereas Polearm would roll Speed and then +2d (advantage) which only applied to Knife, and +1d (length) which only applied to Sword (alternatively, you could simply roll Speed+1d, with a further +1d that only applies against Knife). If ‘Sword’ had been a second Polearm, there would have been no Engage roll on his part as it would have been of equal length to the already fighting Polearm. Once respective advantages are established, subsequent VfP rolls are done as normal. For the sake of argument, no Stride modifiers are used in this example.