Thank you so much for playing and posting on it.
I wondered what I should say, because you're absolutely correct, and I need to address it, but RNG is the core of D&D combat. I think what I can try is making the items that are available at the beginning more apparent because there's a dagger that you can get in the ruins that make combat a lot easier. In the demo version, it's glitched in the player's favor. I forgot to assign a skill to it, so it's using VX Ace's basic attack skill. But even if it wasn't glitched, just the extra attack it gives demonstrably makes combat so much less frustrating (because at level four, one of the feats is Elven Finesse, and that also gives you an extra attack. So, even with a glitched dagger, I still have a feat that demonstrates what it would be to have a proper second attack.). But I know that if I'm not going to change the RNG (and I'm not), then I have to change something else. I had hoped that the no-death method I'm using would make the combat a little more tolerable, but it doesn't seem like it's helping as much as I hoped it would.