Fondots

Regardless of if they're a major factor or not, or what species they're targeting, it's still a shitty thing to do to allow your pet to fuck with the local wildlife.

If you wouldn't go out killing birds, don't let your cat do it either.

Mechanically, I tend to avoid spellcaster type classes, mostly because I don't want to keep track of spell lists and such.

As far as roleplay goes, it depends a bit on who I'm playing with. The actual players rotate a bit, but in general I have 2 main groups I play with, and the type of character I play tends to be pretty different between them.

In the one group, I tend to play sort of the straight man. The other players aren't exactly running murder hobos, but a couple of them skew that direction, and their characters all tend to have big personalities and I tend to be the one who's keeping things a little grounded.

One of our longest-running campaigns was a 5e game that started out as sort of a weird mix of the Rise of Tiamat and Storm Kings Thunder modules that went way off-script. We had an angsty rogue, a drunken warlock who was using some home brew stuff that was roughly like The Fathomless from Tasha's but a few years before that was officially a thing, an elf barbarian who was absent for half the campaign, and a drow (sorcerer I think) who started off being sort of a Drizzt knock-off but shocked us with an amazing plot twist halfway through that he cooked up with the DM where he'd secretly been an agent of Tiamat the whole time... until Tiamat discarded him and we had to figure out what to do with him after that.

And then my character- Randall, a relatively by-the-book military veteran, sword-and-board fighter, who was nominally the leader of the group, he had a grudge against dragons from a previous battle he'd been in, and a bad case of "just when I thought I was out out, they pull me back in" being pretty sick of the adventuring life and really wanted to retire to a quiet farm somewhere, but adventuring was all he had ever known and he kept bouncing from one adventure to another unsure how to make the transition.

In my other group, I have a tendency to play the wildcard. The most extreme example of that was a pirate called Lotor the All-Beard (so named because he was a raccoon, and so covered in fur, he was "all beard")

Lotor was a filthy, chaotic idiot and the dice gods smiled upon him. He was remarkably skilled in all manner of crime, including, somehow, forgery despite being illiterate (He needed someone else to put the words together for him but with that and a handwriting sample he could masterfully forge any document needed.) He didn't speak the common tongue, so couldn't directly communicate with most of the party, but had a magical talking parrot (named Polly, of course) who translated for him (the bird was far more intelligent than Lotor and kind of hated him. Throughout the campaign there were many hints dropped that there was a lot more to this bird than met the eye, but Lotor was too dumb to pick up on any of it.) He stole from, cheated, swindled, and flirted with basically everyone he met, and pretty much just always let the intrusive thoughts win. If there were shenanigans afoot, it was usually his fault.

A lot of his criminal behavior stemmed from a bit of willful ignorance and childlike naivete about laws and social norms. I hadn't seen it at the time I created Lotor, but the Guardians of the Galaxy scene where the concept of theft being illegal is explained to Rocket was pretty much Lotor in a nutshell.

It was also a bit of a running joke that he was actually a fairly formidable and well-known pirate captain who ran a very tight and orderly ship (though a fair amount of those organizational skills may have actually been Polly,) but he considered himself to be "on shore leave" and so basically on vacation for the duration of the campaign and was cutting loose.

Those are sort of the two extremes, but probably my two most beloved characters, and kind of give an overall sense of the direction my characters tend to go with either group.

For your average d&d party, stuff like getting zapped to another plane of existence, potentially including literal hell or a plane made up entirely of gears, isn't an entirely unexpected circumstance. I played in a game one where due to some crazy shit happening to us in the feywild we ended up in sort of the backrooms of the D&D multiverse with an impossibly long tapestry hung on the wall that was a physical manifestation of the weave.

Between those sorts of hijinks and flying around on spelljammers through interplanar space with crystal spheres and all of that mumbo-jumbo, aliens, space travel, and alien technology almost look tame in comparison.

I feel like your best bet to really confuse the characters is probably to have aliens simulating a normal d&d environment for them- maybe the room they wake up in on the ship looks very much like a stereotypical d&d tavern, but little details are wrong. Maybe there's a bard strumming away on his lute but his fingers don't quite match up with the notes he's playing, and the bartender asks if the party would like a "brewed and fermented barley beverage" instead of an "ale"

And the clothing the rest of the people there is all strangely generic and maybe a little dated and things are just generally not adding up, like why is there a red wizard from thay happily playing cards with a waterdavian city guard, and why is that guard drinking in his uniform? and are we even in waterdeep right now? because the elf at the table over there is reading a baldurian newspaper, and also holding it upside down. And is it just me, or are there a whole lot of twins and triplets here?

But things like detect magic aren't turning up anything fishy because it's not magic, it's science.

And maybe when you try to tap someone on the shoulder to ask what the hell is going on, you phase right through them because they're all holograms. A simulation orchestrated by the alien abductors to help the party feel more comfortable and so that they can study them in something close to their natural environment.

It's unacceptable that they're the only ones who are officially exempt.

Kind of seems like the person you're replying to is well-aware of that, and when they said "Churches need to pay taxes," they didn't mean it as "churches are currently legally obligated to pay taxes" but rather "churches paying taxes is something that needs to happen."

If we're going by proximity, there's some Caribbean nations that are even closer to the US than the Falklands are to Argentina, would you argue that we should annex Cuba or the Bahamas?

And from what I understand, the people of the Falklands overwhelming want to be a British territory. I think that's probably the more important consideration.

It is wild that it came to be the way it is. It certainly doesn't make sense to me in the world before modern air travel, the internet, etc. that they'd be ruled by a country so far away, but in this modern era where just about anywhere in the world is only about a day's travel time, or available on-demand 24/7 by phone or computer, it makes every bit as much sense to me that they be a UK territory as it does that Alaska is a US state.

Hawaii is actually a pretty interesting comparison to make, because most Hawaiians did not want to become a US territory at the time, but that's really begging a whole 'nother discussion with lots of complex talking points about imperialism/colonialism, indigenous rights, etc. but I'm frankly just not going to go into that right now. Suffice it to say that it's similar in the sense of it being a small island territory located far from the colonial power that laid claim to it, but the attitudes of the people living there were very different.

I'm no historian or anything of the sort, so take my thoughts on this for what it's worth (and I am certainly biased being an American, don't exactly get a whole lot of Argentinian history books to study, and most of the Spanish I know is food-related, so if someone wants to enlighten me more on the Argentinian side of things, I welcome the education.) But in general my understanding is that the British were the first people to land there, didn't really do much with it at that time, and pretty much just said "finders keepers"

Maybe worth noting, there were no indigenous inhabitants there, so that's probably about as ethical as colonization can get.

Then France showed up and set up shop since the British weren't doing anything with it. Britain came back and also set up shop, and it's not totally clear if either of them even knew the other was there. France eventually decided to fuck off, and let Spain have their bit of the Falklands.

Spain and Britain coexisted for a while, had some scuffles, but more or less worked things out. Eventually Britain pulled out to focus on other things but still considered their "finders keepors" claim to be valid.

Spain eventually pulled out as well, so for a little while no one was really doing much of anything with it officially.

Argentina (technically Buenos Aires at the time if we want to split hairs, I'm going to just use Argentina and Britain to keep the sides easy to follow) comes along, and decides it's theirs, and this is pretty much the root of the dispute. While Britain still held their claim of "finders keepers" Argentina countered with "losers weepers"

Argentina gave some German dude permission to set up a colony for them there to fish and hunt feral cows. Eventually he gets into a fight with an American navy captain over fishing and hunting rights, Captain America kicks their ass a bit and declares the colonial government disolved, and pretty much continues on his merry way. Argentina tries to get things there started back up again but never quite gets their shit back together in the Falklands. A little while later the Brits come back around, still claiming finders keepers, and take charge of everything again, and this time the colonies stick and continue to grow. Argentina spends the next hundred years or so muttering "this is bullshit" to themselves.

Around the 1960s, Britain starts talking about decolonizing, and Argentina gets excited thinking they're going to finally get the Falklands. Britain even quietly floats the idea of giving them the islands, figuring the Islanders would just kind of accept that decision if it was made, and running these islands from halfway around the world was getting kind of expensive. Turns out though that pretty much everyone on the Falklands is pretty damn happy to be British subjects and don't really want to be part of Argentina, which made things a bit complicated.

Argentina gets kind of impatient with all of this, and eventually decided "fuck it, we'll just take them ourselves," Britain cannot abide Argentina's inability to wait patiently in the queue and was starting to really wrap their heads around the idea that the Falklands would rather stay part of Britain and so we get the Falklands war.

Britain wins, Argentina goes back to muttering to themselves, and that pretty much brings us up to the present day.