That’s a fair point. I’ve had moments in groups where it was obvious players weren’t comfortable with “the spoon”. I think, again, MJ hits it just right with mixing the control amongst the group, like dials. I still think most “reactive” players can be tempted to the other side if they are coaxed and rewarded for participating, though.
Rich Rogers´s last blog ..Pondering the Monday one-shot

It sounds like your group is all interested in a more of a traditional, “reactive” style of play in which they each say what they want to do and then the GM handles the rest. 4E (and D&D in general) really lends itself to that style of play and is pretty much constructed to be played that way (hence why we’re all talking about ways of adding it in), and in turn tends to attract those types of players. Hence, I would lean towards the “option” of adding to the narrative and see where it takes you.

Often, if you want to, you can shift players in to a more narrative play style by doing things like this or simply introducing more narrativist (aka Story Now) kind of games as one shots: This is what I’ve done with my own group and how I teach kids how to roleplay (because to be honest I find the “I’m GM and thus god” style of play really uninspiring). For example, with my main adult group. I began running games like InSpectres, PTA, and Committee for the Exploration of Mysteries as one-shots. Nowadays, almost everyone is in to taking narrative control, although some more so than others. In contrast, with the kids at the club I took a much more gradual approach, because they’re very reactive and most are strictly in to power-gaming. Therefore, I started asking them to describe their attacks (giving them a bonus when they did), and then move in to having them describe the outcome (again with a bonus associated with doing so), and then later began allowing them to add to the fiction by using group campaign creation. Once I had them involves with those kinds of activities, I started introducing one-shot games – InSpectres in particular has been very successful in to teaching them how much fun it can be to actively contribute to the story, as well as how failure can also be fun.
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The combat descriptions and minor quests are good tools to keep players interested. I did similar things myself with great success during my college and slightly after college gaming.

But things really get wild and crazy when you take the reins, hand them to the players and start acting as a facilitator. All of the sudden, the hard work of story creation happens at the table instead of hours before anyone else shows up. Now you’re all surprised together when the count betrays the party because one of the players just threw it in there!

To paraphrase the Sons of Kryos (who I think were quoting someone else) “Hand them the spoon!”
Rich Rogers´s last blog ..Pondering the Monday one-shot

I knew I was stretching the definition of narrative control with my implementation of minor quests. It’s probably more the equivalent of directorial control.
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The storyteller hands out minor quests to the players that they can trigger when they want to (subject to game master approval). When they trigger a minor quest, they become the storyteller for said quest (and the game master takes the time given to get his other stuff in order, take a break, etc). When the minor quest is over, they get a certificate as a thank you for running said quest and then they can cash in that cert later like an action point / special daily power.

Once you get into the groove of the game, the suggestion is to stop giving the players the side quest sheets. They make up their own encounters along the way and you give them the yes/no as storyteller. So as they travel from Camelot to where the saxons are, one of the players asks if they encounter anything interesting along the way. The Storyteller turns the question around with a “do you?” and next thing you know one of the players is running an encounter with a knight on a bridge, another has a “goblin” ambush (actually a filthy peasant pretending to be a goblin), and then someone has them run into forward elements of the saxons.

Then you get back to running the game.

Did I ever mention that Greg Stafford was way ahead of his time? It even uses the d02 system (it know no limit!)
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@Declan – one of the difficulties for many systems is that they focus on task resolution (i.e., the stealth check just gets you by the first guard) rather than on a more global conflict resolution in one shot (i.e., one stealth check gets you in and back out of the castle). It’s hard for many GMs to cope with the idea of one skill check being enough to define what may be several minutes to several hours of game time. We’ve all been through the situation where a GM has demanded skill checks every round.

With 4E, skill challenges kind of walk the line between the two situations: The individual tests tend to determine the outcome of specific discrete events, but the whole is designed to simulate the whole “mission” in a more compact, succinct way. In fact, skill challenges are one of the easiest opportunities for a 4E DM to hand over narrative control: Give them the series of skill checks, tell them how well they succeeded, and then leave it up to the players to tell you what actually happened during that time. This won’t work for all skill challenges but easily could be used for overland travel or even investigation if the DM is willing to improv.
MJ Harnish´s last blog ..Weekly Wormy

I might not use this as is but it did gave me an idea that I will use in my game.

As an example I might allow players to describe how they succeed at something. This places a large degree of narrative control in a players hand. I like it because it frees me up from having to invent stuff. If they say they want to sneak into a castle to rescue the princes, I ask them to roll stealth and if they succeed describe how they did it, and they then describe crossing a moat, using the overflow pipe, entering through the dungeons, sneaking passed two guards, and climbing the outside of the tower to get to the window I’ve now got loads of details about the castle that I can use at a later time.

You don’t even need a mechanic for narrative control. Just decide what level of detail you are willing to let players narrate on the fly. I don’t even blink if one of my players says I swing on the jib sheet, or I grab a bottle from the bar and hit him. Each of these allows the player a tiny amount of narrative control – they are creating items in the world. I’m happy if they invent locations – one of my favourite locations in my game is “It still floats” – a ‘used’ boat dealership in Sasserine. One of my players just announced he was going there – and I agreed. I’m also happy to have them invent NPCs on the fly – half my game world were invented by the players.

The way I look at it – its the GMs responsability to make sure the players have a good time (its also the player’s responsability but thats fo another discussion) but that doesn’t mean he has to do all the heavy lifting. I draw the outline but I’m happy for anyone to fill in the details.

Similarly, your players “describing their attacks” isn’t giving them narrative control, it’s simply descriptive roleplaying. Sure they’re participating in the narration, which is awesome, but they don’t actually have any control over the outcome – you’re still telling them if they succeed and what happened. True narrative control happens when they roll the dice, see the result, and say “My sword slashes him across the throat and he falls to his knees as his life slips away.”

Using your example: The player picked up on the conversation between his master and the others and signaled to you “This interests me!” by giving you the card which you followed-up. That’s cool because irregardless of how important it was in your original story, it’s now become an element. However, at no point did he have any influence on the actual narrative outcome. How could you have provided him with narrative control? Have him narrate what he found through is investigation. In other words, he tells the table (including the GM) what he discovered.

I played in a light campaign several months ago with a DM who informally did minor quests (he did one for his girlfriend and that was all… probably only because she was his girlfriend). I played a cleric who was basically a communist–not anachronistically so, but he had similar guiding principals and was an atheist who harnessed “the power of the people” instead of the power of his god. I frequently roleplayed in ways to start peasant uprisings, but the DM constantly forced my character to fail at this regardless of my roleplaying, the situation, and how the dice fell. I was handing him minor quest ideas and trying to make it happen, but he frustrated my efforts.

As the campaign wore on, I gave up on trying to roleplay the character to his fullest potential and resigned to just being a regular old healbot cleric with lasers. It really killed my enjoyment of the game–if the DM had followed your advice and actually fostered some player narrative control, I would’ve enjoyed the game significantly more.

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