Hi there,
Mostly new to LibreOffice, have had it around a year but only been on it here and there for essays and struggled with some of the more advanced functions before.
Can someone explain to me in a simple manner how you go about creating a table of figures that’s laid out with roman numerals (i, ii, iii, iv etc.) and then ToC but with arabic numerals as normal?
Many thanks!
Chris 
You can start from the LibreOffice Help on Creating a Table of Contents.
More at: Chapter 15 - Tables of Contents, Indexes, Bibiographies.
I assume you’re talking about page numbers. Page number formatting is part of the attributes in a page style. Every time in a book where you have a different page layout, you need a different page style. A page style is effective between two “boundaries” created by a “special” page break. These page breaks are “special” because you specify which page style will be applied after the break. They atr created with Insert>more Breaks>Manual Break or a Text Flow property in a paragraph style (in which case the break generally occurs before the paragraph).
Consequently, you need one page style for your essay body (Default Page Style is usually used), one for your list of figures and one for the TOC. Perhaps also for the cover page? In this case First Page is pre-configured for that.
I highly recommend you read the Writer Guide for an introduction to styles.
Do you mean all the Figures are in a separate part of the document with its own page numbering in Roman numerals? In that case the Table of Figures will pick up the style of the page numbering.
Or do you mean the Figures are captioned with Roman numerals as image below? In this instance the images are in the relevant text paragraphs so giving Roman numerals to Arabic numbered pages would be incorrect and confusing.
