Hobgoblin
by Prince Phantom
Hobgoblins might have had the most drastic change to their lore with their revision of all races that got a rework, going from warmongering, highly intelligent martial paragons to fairly hospitable folk with a penchant for helping out and a strict policy of always paying back a gift. If you’re like me and the thought of this lore change is absolutely revolting to you, fret not, as flavor is free and you can definitely reflavor a lot of these fey themed abilities to be something more akin to the abilities of a warlord. I’ll explain how as we go.
Hobgoblin Features
Darkvision : Always nice to have.
Fey Ancestry: Obviously this is a good feature, but how do you flavor it to get away from the fey theme? Just reflavor it so that your mind is so hardened by training and devoted to battle and conquest that the simple temptations of the charms of this world are of no interest to you.
Fey Gift: As for reflavoring this, think of it as you being a commander shouting orders at your troops, bolstering their resolve and pushing them to their limits. Now let’s talk about the actual feature, because it’s very unique and useful. The help action as a bonus action can only be achieved elsewhere by 3 levels of Mastermind Rogue, which is a genuinely terrible subclass that would be a complete waste to take 3 levels in. Granted, Mastermind lets us do this every turn, but we get extra bonuses for the help action and honestly, you probably want to be doing something more impactful with your bonus action than the help action every turn. We have three options for extra effects when we use this special help action.
Hospitality grants a decent number of temporary HP to you and your ally, which is nice to boost durability slightly. At level 1-4, this represents about 22 total temporary HP spread between you and your ally if you use just this option with all of your uses, and scales decently as we level up.
Passage increases our and our ally’s speed by 10ft for the round, which is only situationally useful, but I could see it coming up and helping a friend get away from a bad spot.
Spite imposes disadvantage on one attack to an enemy who is hit by the attack of the ally we help, and yes that is confusing, but it’s also not that strong past low levels as monsters start making a lot more attacks. I think I would default to hospitality most of the time, as it’s always guaranteed to have an effect and scales with level. However, there is a big elephant in the room I need to address. RAW, this entire feature does not work. When you help a creature to give them advantage on an attack against an enemy, you actually use the help action on the enemy, not your ally. This means that RAW, you’re actually conferring all of these benefits to your enemy, and that’s definitely not what WOTC intended. Just ignore the bad wording here and play this feature as the designers clearly intended.
Fortune From the Many: I keep re-reading this feature expecting it to cost our reaction to use, but it’s not there! This is an action-less boost to any attack, ability check, or saving throw (you should almost always use this on saving throws), and in most parties you’ll comfortably reach the cap of +3. Even if your party has 3 or less members, you can fill the void with familiars, summons, undead servants, etc. This can stack with stuff like Flash of Genius from the Artificer or Arcane Deflection from the War Wizard to provide huge boosts to saving throws, making this an amazing defensive feature. As for reflavoring, just revert back to the old version of this feature that was called “Saving Face”, and was flavored as you making sure you looked good around those under you.
Hobgoblins come with an amazing suite of defensive features and a really unique use of our bonus action, giving us a generally great race that can work with a ton of different builds, especially ones that have some uses for their bonus action, but maybe not a use for it every single turn. Also, keep in mind that if you just need the temporary HP from hospitality, you can use the help action outside of combat to bestow them on demand. I definitely recommend giving this race a chance, especially on spellcasters who often already play the support role.
Hobgoblin (Legacy)
The old Hobgoblin might have better lore, but they are a much worse race. We lose all the fey themed abilities, our saving throw boost caps out at +5 but can only be used once per rest, and the only upside is that we gain a few weapon proficiencies and light armor proficiency, which not even armorless casters are that excited about. I don’t see a great reason to ever select this over the revised version.
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