This is the way, you sweet summer child

Me_irl 😞

I’ve never been able to have Skyrim or Witcher 3 click for me, despite trying a few different times (because so many seem to regard them as gold standards of action RPGs, a genre a do like!)

But, to answer your question, for me its probably Stellaris (and, through that, many of the weighty 'paradox games).

I’d always liked games like Civ (Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri being the first 4x that grabbed me, back in the 90s). But, ‘Paradox games’ were something I tried a few times, and bounced off of every time. They’re just a different beast, in terms of ‘weight’.

But, after having tried Stellaris and bounced off of it, I got talked into playing it multiplayer with some of my friends who play it more regularly, and having a knowledgeable person there to explain some of the weirdness and strategy to me made it all click.

And once I got that down, Crusader Kings and Victoria now were like, understandable to me. Though, I do think Stellaris is my favorite out of the bunch.

I’ve never run the beginner box, but I’ve done several PF2e APs.

As written, a lot of the encounters are hard. Many many encounters are tpk bait if the player’s don’t play optimally; without perfection, a bit of bad luck can turn the tide.

I don’t like to fudge things mechanically for the players, but I do play the enemies dumb much of the time, especially like, animals. Even then, there’s quite a few encounters I’ve looked over, and applied the ‘weak’ template to some enemies during my prep.

The balance on PF2e is great, but razor thin at times. This does mean that you should be able to follow the math on enemy level vs party level fairly easily, and see how rough you want the encounters to be.

Also, I’ll ditto the other comment, that having someone with the medicine skill is invaluable. I’ve never used the iconics, but it does seem weird that you said so few have the medicine skill.