Concerning Game Design

When we first talked about Winter Tales game play, I must admit I was a little bit puzzled. Narrativist board-games, as I had tried them, used to leave a bad taste in my mouth. They usually lacked narrative rules and gave players so much freedom, that the story was deprived of any logical tie, pushing the player more to unjustified simplistic conversational actions, than to a construction of a credible and sensible story. Surely, a big part of the problem is that the player first wants to create a beautiful story, without simply growing up during the session, but I'm sure that the system must provide tools that help players create both a beautiful and sensible story.
This is why, when we started working on Winter Tales, I decided to always keep this idea in mind, to determine what our game should be.
Now I have to gather my thoughts in order to bring the many versions of Winter Tales into focus and decide which one is worth telling...

Matteo Santus