Commoner

A commoner is a person. That is the whole stat block. AC 10, 4 HP, a club, no skills except one of the GM's choice from Training. Use them as scenery first and combatants last. The shopkeeper, the stable hand, the kid who runs messages, the farmer at the next table, the priest who lights candles in a temple the party visits twice. None of these need to roll initiative for the world to feel populated.

When a commoner does end up in a fight, run them honestly. They swing the Club at +2 for 1d4 bludgeoning, miss most armored enemies, and drop on a single solid hit. A commoner who survives one round of combat against anything dangerous has done something heroic, and the table should feel that. Don't let players treat NPCs like they're disposable backup unless you want the players to feel like the kind of people who get NPCs killed.

The Training trait is the lever that makes a specific commoner matter. Pick one skill ahead of time and write it on the NPC card. The blacksmith has Training in Smith's Tools and gives advantage on identifying that strange dagger. The midwife has Training in Medicine and stabilizes a downed PC the party can't reach. The cook has Training in Insight and is the first one to notice the new patron is lying. A skill with Advantage from a CR 0 stat block is the cheapest way to give a named NPC a reason to exist.

When commoners die, name one of them out loud before the body hits the ground. The party will remember the name. The villain who killed her becomes a real villain, not a stat block.

A hostile commoner is a mob, never a duel. One commoner with a club is a punchline. Twenty commoners with torches and pitchforks at the inn door are a problem the players cannot solve by killing them. Frame the encounter as a social and tactical mess: the party's wizard could fireball the crowd, but the survivors are the village she just saved last week, and the dead include the children of the people who fed her.

Use commoners as the failure mode of a noble's plan, a cult's recruitment drive, a propaganda campaign, a riot, a witch hunt. The party's job is to defuse, not to win initiative. If they insist on combat, the commoners attack with Club at +2 for 1d4, drop on a hit, and the rest break and run after one or two go down. Morale collapses quickly because none of them want to be here. Most of them came because they were scared of what the others would do if they didn't show up.

The interesting question is who organized them. Find that NPC and the encounter ends. Until then, every round the party spends fighting is a round the manipulator escapes. Make that explicit through scene dressing: a hooded figure on the rooftop watching, a scroll being burned in a chimney, a horse being saddled at the back of the inn. The commoners are not the encounter. They are the wall the encounter is hiding behind.

Have one commoner say a name as they swing. The name should mean something to a player.