Gearbound
Your forge is cold and the loan's due at the end of the month. Take the jobs nobody else wants, hammer out the gear, and hand it to four wanderers who fight like whatever you put in their hands.
You're a blacksmith one bad month from losing the family forge. The loan's due at the end of the month, so you take the cheap work: dredging rusted blades off dead adventurers, escorting grain carts, hauling out whatever the last party couldn't.
Then you melt it down and make something better.
GEAR IS THE CLASS
Four wanderers walk in off the road in plain travel clothes. None of them is anything in particular yet. Put plate and a tower shield on one and he's your tank. Take it off, hand him silk and a staff, and he throws fireballs instead. Same four bodies, different party.
You're never arming the mage. There's no mage until you put a staff in someone's hands.
YOU DON'T FIGHT, YOU FORGE
Once they're kitted they go down without you, and you don't have to watch. Stay at the anvil and the run sits in a corner widget: four health bars, the floor they're on, loot scrolling past as they pick it up. It goes red before a wipe, and there's a Tactical Retreat button for when you see it coming.
Or open the dungeon view and watch the whole fight, damage numbers and all. Nothing pauses either way.
THE SHOP SHOWS YOUR WORK
You start in a cracked room with one working smelter and a debt notice nailed to the door. Every rank you climb lights another station, fills the shelves, and warms the place up. By the time you're Legend of the Forge there are banners on the walls and people at the door watching you work.
AT THE ANVIL
Smelt ore into alloys. Roll prefixes and suffixes off whatever you feed the enchanter. Cut sockets, set gems, and stack same-material sets for buffs that hit the whole party. Push all of it through a research tree that takes the chores off your hands, so the smelting and the selling start running themselves.
REPUTATION OPENS THE MAP
Salvage contracts first. As your name gets around you get into Verdant Hollow, then the Ruined Outskirts, then the Warren Depths.
When you hit a wall you can't forge your way past, you hang up the hammer and hand the shop to an heir. He keeps what you earned and starts with more room to grow.
WORTH KNOWING
The sim runs whether you're looking at it or not, and it's deterministic: same seed, same choices, same outcome, every time.
It's done when you buy it. No microtransactions, no energy timers, nothing to buy later.