I've been posting on story games and praxis about this game I'm working on and I thought I'd post on the forge too.  Hopefully I won't get cognitive overload :).  My game is an offshoot of Blood Red Sands, blended with concepts from FATE and TSoY.  Narration is like in Blood Red Sands or Universalis; at any time, one of the players is the narrator and the narrator will probably change many times during a session.

One of my goals is to make a collaborative RPG that feels a lot like a "traditional" single-GM RPG -- you have authority over your PC, you can keep it between sessions, it gets experience, the story feels coherent, etc.  I'm still a bit nooby with indie RPGs; I've played years of Universals, FATE, and PDQ (combining them all), but that's the extent of my indie experience (got to play Trollbabe at Gencon :)).  Here's what I'm doing in my game to try to achieve that goal, and I was hoping some people would comment on it.  In case anyone out there has ready my story games posts, my game has changed significantly since my last SG or Praxis post...

The story framework is based on a set of aspects (from FATE) which also function as TSoY keys (fate points are refreshed using refreshment scenes, like in Lady Blackbird) -- fate points are like in FATE.  There is a story creation phase at the start of the game, where the players create a "story objective," which is an aspect shared by the PCs.  The players name acts, create "act objectives" which are also aspects that are shared by the PCs (only for that act), and create starting events for the acts (just descriptions of how the acts start off).  Achieving an objective or making it impossible to achieve buys off the aspect (like a TSoY key) and the PCs get experience for that.  Act objective aspects disappear at the end of an act if you don't buy them off and likewise for the story objective at the end of the story.

Players control PCs, which they keep from session to session and "story components" which are people or things that are local to an act (but they can also appear in other acts) and these all have aspects.  These aspects drive their motivations, so they can interact with objective aspects.  Aspects function like they do in FATE, except that a compel generates experience rather than fate points; it's called "hitting" the aspect like hitting a key in LB.  Hitting an aspect gives you AND the player who is currently narrating 1 XP.  If you're endangering or seriously inconveniencing your PC or its friends, it's 2 XP for you AND the narrator.  Buying it off is 10 XP for you (and not for the narrator, currently, although that's a possibility).

The players have authority over their PCs and their story components.  That means that the narrator can't take over an NPC and make it do something like they would do in a single-GM game, but the narrator does still control the world and the past, to a great extent.  If a player was playing a guard and the narrator wanted that guard to patrol a hallway, he could frame a flashback to that guard getting orders to patrol the hallway.  The owning player still has authority over his guard NPC, but now he knows what the guard's orders are.

So that's what I have for story framework: aspects for the characters, group aspects for the story objective and act objectives, starting events and names for the acts, and an experience system that rewards the player and the narrator for a player playing to their characters' aspects.  I THINK that's fairly complete.  We've been play testing this for a few months and we seem to be getting stories out of it that don't seem random or forced (fingers crossed).

Bill Burdick