Posted By Hellfury on 04/10/2007 6:02 PM
Neither does every space marine with in x radius going ape edited because they see a pretty banner.
In fact, I find the banner less useful than purity seals or bionics, yet the banner stays, because its cool looking.
I see a huge whorl of circular logic encompassing that statement.
Obviously there is always going to be a subjective decision on the games designer's part over whether something should be an aesthetic choice only or have representation in the rules.
However, according to Jervis he is trying to get the designers to cut down on having a rule for the sake of having a rule and rather only actually have a rule where it is needed.
He said that if anyone is to blame for 40k going down the path of writing rules for the sake of rules, he was to blame. But this is something that he is trying to hold the designers to at this point.
So while a company standard is clearly an aesthetic choice, players can always use 'regular' banners if they want without paying the points. The company standard is a rather symbolic piece of wargear and books/movies always represent models fighting harder to save their banner (think: the Dawn of War intro), so it only makes sense that the banner have some sort of special rules attached to it.
What Jervis didn't like about the bionics/purity seals (for example) was that if players didn't like the rules or the points values for these items, they wouldn't put them on their models, even though they liked the aesthetic value of them.
When it comes to adorning your models he didn't want rules to dictate how you did that, unless it was really necessary (like a weapon or major piece of wargear).
Overall I personally like the concept and I hope they continue to adhere to it in the future.