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Message: <blockquote data-quote="humble minion" data-source="post: 8514255" data-attributes="member: 5948">You're not wrong, and that's one of the reasons I find this annoying.  This was an opportunity to give goblinoids some unique and characteristic flavour, and instead WotC went the lazy recycled route.Just brainstorming for a minute, they've done some work giving bugbears the 'boogeyman' feel.  Big, furry, sneaky, can squeeze in anywhere, and extra damage when they jump on you when you're unaware.  That's good.  What I'd have done with goblins is emphasise that they're a race who are consummate survivors among bigger, nastier, more dangerous creatures.  Give them 35 speed (that REALLY makes them stand out if halflings etc keep their 25 speed, as they do in my personal canon), and maybe give them advantage on any roll or save to avoid being restrained or grappled, and let them squeeze through holes two sizes smaller, like bugbears can.  And maybe something like poison resistance, given that they get the last choice of food and they've acclimatised to noxious things.  I don't think Fury of the Small is interesting or needed.  The bonus action disengage/hide goes back to being a rogue class feature as nature intended  This means that PC goblins will no longer be penalised for taking a very characteristic class by having one of their major racial abilities invalidated with no compensation at level 1, while NPC monster manual goblins may well have that ability because that's how NPCs work.  And that gives you a goblin with some interesting traits, which CAN have a fey origin if it suits your campaign setting, but which also reasonably reflects how goblins have been portrayed though 40 years of D&D.Hobgoblins are the hardest of the three, to be honest, because it's always been their militaristic culture that makes them stand out.  But where does that leave you if your setting doesn't have militaristic hobgoblins, or your hobgoblin PC was abandoned at a monastery at birth and raised by unworldly monks?  I'd maybe be tempted to say that they're a constructed race, magically created in the depths of time as soldiers perhaps by some long-forgotten goblinoid warlord.  They're self-willed, but they were designed as sacrificial warriors and it still shows.  Perhaps advantage vs fear effects?  Second wind as a racial ability?  Ability remove a level of exhaustion during a short rest 1/day?  A fighting style at level 1?  Or hell, give them a battlemaster maneuver and a couple of superiority dice - we hand out racial cantrips and spells like candy, why not martial maneuvers as well?Just don't throw our hands up in the air and copy-paste some stuff from the elf statblock when there's no gobinoid lore in D&D ever that suggests it.</blockquote>

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