Ovinomancer
No flips for you!
The choice you're describing here is entirely dependent on an offer being made and you having blindly selected an option that plays into the offer. Your choice is, as you note, to accept the offer or decline it. How much you "play into your piety" is really, again, obfuscating the issue, because it's not your playing into the piety that counts, it either you passing the pre-scripted wickets or convincing the GM through social interaction to agree with you. It's entirely gated by the GM -- your say is just to accept or not.
Now, can this make a difference in the entertainment at the table? Absolutely. Can entertaining the GM be a pathway to having the GM give you boons in game? Sure thing! Is this agency? Not really, you aren't making choices, you're finding triggers tied to previous blind choices and can accept or decline them (sometimes, usually not, actually, in pre-scripted adventures).
I find it odd, though, that you feel sufficiently able to discuss pre-written adventures on this topic while saying lack of familiarity hinders your ability to talk to other aspects.
This is not quite true -- the GM can either say yes or roll the dice. There's not ability to automatically declare an action a failure (outside of genre violations, but that shouldn't be handled in game), just the ability to call for a check on an action. And, Position and Effect are negotiable and entirely constrained by the fictional positioning. The GM is not free to just label everything Desperate/No Effect.
Contrasted to D&D, the GM does have the authority to fiat fail an action declaration. The GM has full authority to set all particulars of any check they call for without constraint. They can always add hidden backstory to support anything they've chosen to do.
A poor treatment, but mostly yes. The XP triggers are fixed, but the player usually has the authority to decide if one is met or not. They're really easily answered questions though, so trying to game the XP system is very obvious. I mean, "You struggled with issues from your vice or traumas," is going to be glaringly obvious if you say yes and take XP and it didn't actually come up.
The GM doesn't actually decide difficulty, just risk and reward envelopes. There absolutely aren't more gradiations in D&D, unless you're, strangely, referring to the number of +/-s and the scale of the d20? That's a weird assertion. And the general structure is extraordinarily different in process resolution -- if you claim to have played BitD and don't recognize this, I'm not sure what you played but it wasn't done very well.
Let's examine a recent moment from my game, it even addresses loss of PC control, so others my find it instructional.
The crew was sneaking into an old, rumored to be haunted, abandoned manor house. They had entered the premises through an old servants tunnel, and emerged in a room full of furniture covered in sheets and cobwebs, jumbled about. This is just to set the scene, and the whys of the score don't matter to this vignette. Since none of this was challenging (and covered by the excellent engagement roll), this was just narration -- the scene started when they entered the hallway from the room and saw a dim lamp at the end with a shadowed figure -- clearly a guard -- there. I described the hall, merely as color, as being wide, with dilapidated chairs and a few broken tables along the walls, which were covered by peeling wallpaper and a few old, dusty portraits. To enhance the air of 'haunted" I described one portrait of a young woman who eyes seemed to follow the PCs. As two PCs snuck down the hallway to engage the guard, one PC -- mentioned earlier as the one trying to change their vice -- said they were going to examine the young woman's portrait to see if it would be interesting to those at the University he was trying to woo. This seemed interesting -- I could have just said yes -- so I asked the player how they were going to do this? What counts as "interesting" and how do you know? The player thought a moment, and said that his old friend at the University liked the occult, so he was going to see if the portrait held occult value. I said, maybe, let's check, what are you doing to find out? The player looked at their sheet, shrugged, and said, "I guess I Attune and see if I get any feels from it, but I have zero dice in Attune. Maybe I can ask the Whisper to do it?" I responded sure, but he's off taking care of the guard right now, do you want to wait? The player said, no, I'll do it, I'm going to push for 1 die. I said, okay, the position is controlled (they got a controlled result on the engagment roll, so all initial situations are set to controlled position) and said normal effect (the default, you need a reason to change it). He rolled, and failed. I now got to put a consequence in play. I chose to worsen the position and said that as the player looked at the portrait, the figure suddenly turned their head and looked at the player, and he found it was difficult to look away and there was a feeling of pulling or suction, but not physical. The player was like, "okay, I guess that answers that question, it's occult, um... I try to pull away." I said, sure, but hang on, let me check in with the other PCs for a moment while you're staring into the creepy painting. I did, they succeeded, and we got back to the PC.
The PC tried to pull away from the painting, and declared a wreck action to do to -- using violence to destroy a thing. He had dice, and since I had worsened the position previously, I set position to Risky (which is normal, you need a reason to change it) and normal effect again. The PC failed again (honestly, this is a trend in my Blades game, largely because the players seem to enjoy trying actions they have no or one rank in). Now the picture started glowing, and the young lady turned into a hideous creature. I told the PC you feel your soul being sucked into the portrait and cannot escape! I leveled some Harm, which was Resisted. The other PC noticed this (glowing portrait) and the Whisper (think occultist) trying to intervene and used Attune with their Command ability to try to force the animating spirit in the portrait to flee. Since their friend was in danger, this was again Risky and Normal. The Whisper succeeded with complication, and so the portrait entity released the first PC, but in doing so a backlash of psychic energy whipped back at the Whisper and they suffered a Harm. They elected to not Resist, as it was a level 1 harm, and they like to keep a ready supply of Stress for rolling. This choice, though, had some unfortunately repercussions later in the Score, and the harm was to their occult abilities and that became very, very relevant again.
Telegraphing in Blades is pretty straightforward -- you follow the fiction. You also use soft and hard moves, to borrow from PbtA -- if you want to level a consequence that isn't yet in the fiction, you can use a soft move on a failure to introduce a new complication. Then the players have to act against that, or you pay it off. If they fail again, you can pay it off. If you look to my example, the entire issue with the portrait was initiated by the player -- they even determined it was going to be of an occult nature and the attendant risks that can come with that. Still, since the initial position was controlled (and probably would have been without the engagement roll because there was no established threat in the fiction), the failure here involved such a soft move -- the picture is trying to consume your soul, what do you do?! It wasn't until the player tried to do something about that and failed that this harm paid off. So the telegraph was firstly, the player initiating an interaction with a potential occult item in a haunted manor. Then, the telegraphing was that the picture was very dangerous and attacking you, you need to do something to avoid this. This is how you telegraph in Blades.
Again, if you played Blades and this wasn't obvious, then I'm sorry for your poor experience.
