Sure thing. Lets say we’ve got a player who is playing a priest. They have a character aspect: “Priest with six guns. On a mission from God.” One of the foundational things about Fate is that a character is more likely to succeed to more involved that character’s fiction is in whatever they are attempting to do, but the book doesn’t do a good job laying this out to the reader. The players look at their sheets. They see a number of listed actions and approaches. Feeling a little lost, they say “Can I attack in a flashy way?” I think we can both agree that this kind of classic “Mother may I” just isn’t interesting during play. We want our players to embrace the fiction and act in accordance with established aspects. But the above is fine, right? It’s just the players feeling a little lost and generally being new, right?

I’d be ok with the above if that’s where it ended for me. However, during play, I often felt like players would want to involve aspects (as they should). So they’ll ask things like: “I would like to try to shoot the chandelier that’s swinging on the ceiling down, hitting General Holtz and his men. I’m a priest with six guns. Do you think that this is ok? Oh, and I know it’s swinging because Otto just used it to swing from one balcony to another, so could I use the Swinging aspect here somehow? Maybe God could come into picture here somehow.” And now you’ve got to have a full conversation about the act of shooting down a chandelier whereas in other systems you could have just called for an attack roll against object AC with a harness value based on metal or something.

This is kinda what I mean by asking permission. There is a need to have a constant, evolving conversation about the fiction to make sure everyone understands what is happening. When there’s uncertainty, the players default to asking clarifying questions and mostly ask permission to do things. I have personally found the need to constantly update this conversation to be a little annoying.

I ran FAE for maybe 6 sessions before throwing in the towel. The system is good, but I feel like it just doesn’t have enough game to satisfy me on a personal level. The feel of running FAE is more collaborative story time than playing a game together. This is a feature and a bug of the game. How much it bothers you is very subjective. What I found to be the case with FAE is that my players defaulted to asking permission to do anything out of unfamiliarity and discomfort. After they got their footing and were able to move past this point, they still wanted to engage in discussions about the fiction for extended periods of time. To me, this lowered my enjoyment of the sessions a lot. For such a rules light system, we sure ended up talking about rules and what was possible a lot.

There’s nothing in Blades that requires you to run it in Doskvol, but that setting does have a few things going for it that makes Blades easier to run. Firstly, the players can’t just nope out of the city and lie low for a while in the countryside. They’re forced to deal with Doskvol all the time. Secondly, there are real and immediate consequences to murder and death. This incentivizes the players to at least attempt non-lethal methods. Of these, only the pressure cooker environment is really crucial for a game of Blades. The rest of the setting adapts just fine. You could, for example, run Blades in a post-nuclear war 1950s era New Orleans where the surrounding lands are surrounded by nuclear fallout. The city, however, survives due to protections conferred by devils.

Doskvol is just a tad too dark for Arcane, I do agree there. You don’t necessarily have to adapt Blades itself tho. Have you taken a look at a|state RPG? It also uses the Forged in the Dark engine but is a little more lighthearted. In that game, the crew are troublemakers trying to make one corner of a hellish urban landscape into a better place. The system makes caring as important as fighting. I think you might have better success with that system.