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<blockquote data-quote="rounser" data-source="post: 204845" data-attributes="member: 1106">Fighting's not all you may want stats for.&nbsp; Bluff, diplomacy, pickpocket etc.Sure, you can fake it, but players often catch on to that, which can make the world feel less real - IMO, names are more important than stats as a bare minimum - few things about an NPC say &quot;I'm not important!&quot; more than not having a name...Jamis Buck's NPC Generator combined with the pregens in the DMG mean that you need not do much of it by hand, though.&nbsp; On top of that, you can always make a handful of different stats to represent an archetype (say, 5 distinct and meaningfully different sets of commoner stats) and re-use them over and over to represent a city worth of commoners.That said, doing a short Name / Appearance / Personality / Occupation / Likely Activity / Acquaintances one-liner for every commoner in the city is also likely to violate the First Rule of Dungeoncraft, so you could just prepare them for 20 commoners and have them slip into roles as you need them, just as their stats do, and perhaps generate more between sessions as you &quot;use them up&quot;.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="rounser, post: 204845, member: 1106"] Fighting's not all you may want stats for. Bluff, diplomacy, pickpocket etc. Sure, you can fake it, but players often catch on to that, which can make the world feel less real - IMO, [i]names[/i] are more important than stats as a bare minimum - few things about an NPC say "I'm not important!" more than not having a name... Jamis Buck's NPC Generator combined with the pregens in the DMG mean that you need not do much of it by hand, though. On top of that, you can always make a handful of different stats to represent an archetype (say, 5 distinct and meaningfully different sets of commoner stats) and re-use them over and over to represent a city worth of commoners. That said, doing a short Name / Appearance / Personality / Occupation / Likely Activity / Acquaintances one-liner for every commoner in the city is also likely to violate the First Rule of Dungeoncraft, so you could just prepare them for 20 commoners and have them slip into roles as you need them, just as their stats do, and perhaps generate more between sessions as you "use them up". [/QUOTE]

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