Indie RPG elements in SR4, Who gets to tell the story? Options

[TheGothfather]

So, I've been putting a lot of thought into using some gameplay concepts from indie/story games in my SR4 campaign. So far, the houserules I've added have been both effective and well-received. I may post my full houserules to my blog in the future, but I don't really want to post a 3 page writeup on what I've changed on this forum, unless I get requests to do so.

What I would like to do, however, is pick people's brains on a couple of specific ideas, one of which I've actually implemented in my game, and one which I'm kinda toying with.

The first thing I did in my game was to shift some of the narrative control to the players. Basically, whenever a player wants his character to take some kind of action, he has to not only describe what the character is doing, but also how he does it. I just announce the threshold for the action, and he rolls. If he succeeds, then the player has essentially just narrated the action. If he fails, then I introduce some kind of complication. Sometimes, it's a simple failure at the task. Sometimes the task succeeds, but something unexpected happens. The idea is that tests are no longer necessarily made on the basis of failing or succeeding at a task, but rather succeeding or failing to get what the player wants for his character.

If you've read or played The Burning Wheel RPG, then this should look really familiar.

The other idea that I've been toying with is using Edge to allow the players to affect the narrative. Sure, they can use Edge to gain the same mechanical benefits as usual, but I thought it might be interesting if the players could also spend a point to introduce something into the story – maybe an NPC, or maybe to cause something to happen. So long as it didn't contradict anything that's already been established, I think it might be kinda cool to have a game-mechanical method of being a little more of an active participant in the story, rather than simply having to react to whatever the GM does.

Just something to spark a little discussion that wasn't about flaws in the rules, or metaplot issues.