You don’t have to do smithing for mot of Skyrim. And you can get gear without smithing. Smithing just gave꧟ you a way to level up quickly and produce specific gears on a larger scale.

I played MMORPGs beﷺfore I started DMing. I find boss battles aren’t that bad to handle if you treat them like raid boss battles. Give the boss more health and some neat mechanics the. Things go a long way. And there are plenty of online resources for homebre💙w that you can simply reskin to fit a visual theme.