Star Wars Encounter Builder

How encounter balancing works in SWURPG

Every enemy in the bestiary carries a Threat Rating, or TR — a single number for how dangerous that unit is against a typical four-player party at the same level. TR is not just damage and hit points. It folds in survivability, accuracy, action economy, area pressure like autofire, control effects, and tactical traits such as coordination and repositioning.

To weigh an encounter, add the TR of every enemy in the scene and compare the total to your party's average level. A level 4 party facing eight stormtroopers at TR 0.5 each is looking at a total TR of 4 — a Standard fight. Swap four of those troopers for a captain at TR 2 and the total is unchanged, but the fight plays harder, because the captain makes everyone around him more accurate.

The four bands

• Easy — total TR around half the party level. The party should win without spending much.
• Standard — total TR around the party level. A real fight with real resource cost.
• Hard — total TR around one and a half times the party level. Someone will probably go down.
• Deadly — total TR at twice the party level or beyond. The party may need to retreat, regroup, or get clever.

Party size shifts the whole scale. Three players are treated as one level lower than they are; five or more as one level higher. It is a crude adjustment and deliberately so — it is meant to be done at the table in a second, not calculated.

Why the band is an estimate

The numbers tell you roughly what you are handing your players, not exactly. The rulebook makes the point itself: a level 6 party against a death trooper and four stormtroopers totals TR 6, which is a Standard budget at that level — and it becomes genuinely deadly the moment you set it in tight corridors with overlapping fire lanes and no cover. Terrain, objectives, enemy coordination and the order you reveal reinforcements all move a fight more than one point of TR does.

Treat the band as a starting position. If it reads Standard and you wanted bruising, add terrain before you add TR.

Does equipment matter?

The budget uses party level only, because that is what the published rule uses — and level already implies level-appropriate gear, since weapons and armor are gated by minimum level. But rarity in SWURPG is a story gate rather than a level gate: a party with the credits for a rare jetpack still has to find someone willing to sell one. Two parties at the same level can end up several points of armor class apart.

So the builder does not quietly adjust your budget for gear. Load your party instead, and it will show you what this specific encounter does to these specific characters — the enemies' actual attack bonuses against your actual armor class. That is information you can act on, rather than a number pretending to be precise.

Bringing your own party

Ask each player to open their character, turn on sharing, and send you the link. Paste those into the party panel and the builder reads each character's armor class, hit points and level straight off their saved sheet. Sharing a character this way does not put it in the community gallery — the link works, and that is all it does. If the characters are on your own account, you can add them directly instead.

Two things the panel is careful about. It reports attack rolls only, because grenades and other saving-throw effects carry no attack roll — and those are frequently the ones that hurt a party most, so a figure that silently included them would be worse than one that admits the gap. And it names your lowest-hit-point character rather than averaging them away, because the average party member is not the one who goes down.

The numbers come from each character's last save. If someone levelled last session and hasn't re-saved, the panel says how old the snapshot is instead of pretending it is current. Nothing about your party is stored on our servers or put in the share link for an encounter — it stays in your browser.