- since your setting idea is very broad you could try the world creation together with your players. Fate Core has a good guide on this.
- If you want to play Fate in your own Setting, then DFRPG is a bad game to start with. There are a lot better Fate systems you can use and are available for free. DFRPG moved quite a bit away from the core spirit of Fate
-for high Fantasy I can recommend checking out the Atomic Robo ruleset. It sounds a bit far fetched but it would actually be quite a good fit for high fantasy as well. It's also an improved (imho) version of the fate core rules
- use the fate systems toolkit to decide how magic should work in your world. That's probably going to be the most important decision you have to make upfront.

1) That's actually pretty much th eplan.
2) I'll reserve judgement.  I *know* the Dresden system best.  With a group of veteran players I might be more willing to experiment, but with this group, I need all the rules familiarity I can muster to keep the game on track.  They're getting better, but...
3) I'll keep that in my mind.
4) I actually _like_ how Dresden makes it work.  High risk, high reward, with a decent measure of resource management.  For my table, the extra complexity involved in magic is actually a feature, not a bug.  It gives me a 'high work' character type I can give to the most advanced player at my table, while reserving easier characters for everyone else.

Personally, I'm planning to keep the laws in place.  And the technology hexing... doesn't come up all that often at my tables.  Honestly, hexing tech is more of a compel opportunity for wizards than anything else -- removing it would make them weaker, not stronger.  (Or am I missing something?)

My basic idea is NOT to port D&D to fate.  I want to keep as much of Fate (and Dresden) as I can, while switching to a high-fantasy setting.  A lot of the players are relatively new to gaming, and hitting them over the head with a new system will be 'fun' enough without me having to learn it at the same time.  I wouldn't even consider it if it weren't for the fact that they can't handle the 5E rules, so I *need* the simpler rules of Dresden to help them along.

Thanks, I'll have to look at those.  I knew that my next paycheck was probably going towards Fate Core anyway, but...

I've got some friends who are interested in RPGs, and have been having fun with 5E D&D.  Unfortunately, several of them are struggling with the rules-heavy nature of D&D -- and it's simply impossible for me as the DM to remember all the rules of every feature for them.  Just too much text.

DFRPG, on the other hand, is much lighter on the rules, and the 'exact text' rarely matters as much except as a clarifier for the basic concept.  It's easier to learn, easier to teach, and I think the fudge die approach is much better than a generic D20 roll.  Especially with fate points flying around.  Character sheets are a lot easier to read and understand, and there's a lot less 'inventory management' hassles.

That said, there is a lot of setting-oriented material to plow through, and I don't want to try and drag them all through it.  Most of them will read the actual books, eventually, and I don't want to spoil it for them -- and I'm simply too lazy to repeatedly info dump for some of the others, who will probably need a reminder every single time.  So I don't want to use the basic setting.

I went and looked, and as far as I can tell there aren't very many high-fantasy FATE systems currently.  (Found a referenence to one, but it was discontinued).  So -- as I imagine is obvious by now -- I had the bright idea of hacking DFRPG into a high fantasy system.

I'd love the advice of people more familiar than I am to extend, revise, and improve the basic conversion.

Here is a link to the google doc, please let me know what you think.  Thanks in advance.