Reach weapons and Gang-Up

I was working on ranges related to https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forum...-to-large-NPCs, and I found another issue with melee reach and the gang-up bonus. The gang-up rules seems to be misapplying the rules when attackers have reach and the arrow showing distance (like in that earlier post) incorrectly shows distance for large creatures and would seem to require a reach weapon to attack adjacent large enemies.

The SWADE rules list the way gang-up works as applying to "Each additional adjacent foe," so, it seems a little wonky for reach weapons to begin with. For instance, 3 goblins surround an enemy and attack from 1". By the rules, they do not get a gang-up bonus, as none of them are adjacent. This seems strange to me, but I don't see a different way to read the rules. But even applying this to the SWADE ruleset does not produce the correct results. If we have a character being attacked by 3 enemies, 2 with short swords (and thus adjacent) and one with a spear who is 1" away, then by the RAW, the short sword users would attack at +1 (there is one ally also adjacent) and the spear user would get +2 (as he has 2 additional attackers who are both adjacent). The SWADE ruleset instead gives them all +1. It appears to calculate it as # adjacent -1 and then apply that to the target.

Then we have large enemies. These can be placed so that they are adjacent to a human sized target, but the range between the 2 is listed as 1". It correctly still counts them for gang-up, but if using the distance arrow to determine the need for reach, it would imply that you need a reach weapon to attack an adjacent enemy. Similarly, it is possible to move a regular sized attacker (possibly with a reach weapon) a pixel away, thus making then non-adjacent, but still <1". This, correctly, removes the gang-up bonus, but it is still odd that you can be surrounded by 2 creatures and the one listed as 0 away does not apply gang-up, but the one 1" away does. It is both correct by RAW and reasonable from a rules standpoint, but the display is misleading.

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Originally Posted by ApesAmongUs

The SWADE rules list the way gang-up works as applying to "Each additional adjacent foe," so, it seems a little wonky for reach weapons to begin with.

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I've seen this clarified by Clint Black (Pinnacle Ent. staff) a few times over the years on the peginc.com forums. According to him adjacent means melee adjacent, which is any PC or Extra equipped with a melee weapon that can strike the target without the need for movement. So an ally PC or Extra with a 1" reach weapon that's 1" away from the target is melee adjacent and counts towards a PC's or Extra's ganging up bonus. He was commenting on SWD, but it should still be the same for SWADE as the wording in regards to the target hasn't changed - just that each defender adjacent to the target now cancel out one +1 bonus.
Where it gets tricky and where I witnessed some real heated forum threads, is whether an ally with the Lunge edge (extend the reach of any melee weapon by 1", available for some settings) who's equipped with a 1" reach weapon and 2" distance from the target counts towards the ganging up bonus. According to Clint they don't qualify because Lunge implies a 1" movement towards the target, and even thought it's a free movement, it's still movement.

As to the rest of your comments and your discoveries in the other thread, yeah that definitely looks like a bug in the FG SWADE ruleset to me. Unfortunately I don't have any idea where exactly the targeting algorism comes into play in the code.

Well, if that's the case, then gang up isn't working correctly in the SWADE FG ruleset either - even when ignoring the displayed distance. Reach weapons and enemies with reach only gang-up if the bases (highlighted square base in the case of pogs) are in contact. Apparently it matched my reading of the rules (almost), but doesn't actually match the rules as intended (which are better, thankfully).