Guys. Guys.

I need to put the brakes on here for a second.

There are doubtless countless ways to justify or rationalize the presence of heavily armed and armored civilians. It’s not a problem. Really! I can come up with lots of scenarios as well.

In exactly none of the scenarios do you have a functional, peaceful society where those armed and armored civilians are. That’s my point. My point, in the OP, has to do with how space adventure gaming seems — to me — to start from the unexamined premise that that’s who the PCs are: armed civilians in possession of armed paramilitary non-state-sanctioned ships.

And yes of course there are exceptions. Jesus. Do we really need to trot out Star Trek again? Well done, you’ve identified a generally functional, peaceful sci-fi setting where the guns are generally pointed outward at the frontier and enemy nations. Great. We nailed that one down.

I mean is my premise completely off here? Or is it just kind of fun at this point to find the exceptions?

I know that whenever I’ve started up any kind of space adventure game, the first place everyone goes is into how to arm their ships. I’ve run Edge of the Empire several times, I’ve run Stars Without Number, I’ve run WEG’s Star Wars, and so on. Shit, back in the day I ran Star Trek but then you’ve got the premise that you’re very much a state actor. You’re damned right you and your crew is safe(ish) inside a militarized exploration ship.

So, because maybe it wasn’t totally clear in the OP and maybe it’s more fun to dream up exceptions and maybe that feels like it’s discarding my premise, I just want to restate first principles:

* I think it’s weird that gamers start from such an unexamined set of assumptions w/r/t their space adventure gaming. I blame Star Wars, never mind a deeper read from the EU stuff. Han’s a smuggler flying around with military hardware strapped to his cargo plane and that’s become the baseline for space adventure.

* I think if we took a minute to think about what life would be like where not-exceptional folks felt the need to pack heavy, it would stop being such a romp.

* Very charitable reading here: It might be that the template for space adventure everyone has just doesn’t include anything about the non-exceptional surroundings because it’s boring? I don’t think it’s boring. And that’s one thing I’m thinking a lot about.

Feel free to #notallstarwars  the whole thing. That’s fine. SW is the first but not the only example. Here I’m thinking about Killjoys and Dark Matter and Firefly(ish, yes yes the Serenity isn’t armed) and Traveller(ish, yes yes the starting cheapie Scout doesn’t come armed) and Consider Phlebas and…