Addicted to Vault Hunters right now. It's awesome! Also it's more a game in itself and if you come in without any prior knowledge it will be hard.
There is a quest book but it doesn't cover everything.
It's closer to games like diablo where 90% of the gameplay is looting dungeons (or vaults in this case). Which isn't the first thing that comes to mind when people say RPG
I started playing Create: Prepare to Dye (Modrinth, CurseForge) which removes all survival elements from the game and has you focus on purely automation. You crash land on a unique looking planet devoid of resources and have to figure out how make everything from scratch using all-custom recipes, starting by making things from just milk.
There's (funny) contracts that push you to discover how to make new resources and automate them, and they give you neat things in return. Many things can be made in a number of different ways, so it's up to you to pick one, or decide when to move to a different recipe when it becomes available to you.
Everything is themed around dyes so instead of iron plates, you'll see white plates. Instead of gold or brass ingots, you have yellow cubes. Copper is orange. Diamond is light blue. I've been very happy with the choice of mods used in this pack. Two essential ones are Create (obviously) but also Botania – the tech / automation mod everyone forgets about.
One of my best friends 15yo brother got a PC for Christmas and has been wanting to play modded Minecraft for a long time. I set up an RLCraft server yesterday on my hosting PC and we're going to dive into it this afternoon. He's wanted to play this pack since he was 11 and claims he's a really good Minecraft player but we're definitely going to find out today lol. After we play this pack I'm hoping he and my friend will want to delve into some more traditional mod packs as neither has ever done modded Minecraft before. Wish us luck 🤞
RLCraft is definitely a modpack, ha. Don't be afraid to change packs if you end up getting frustrated, since I've heard that unfair deaths are pretty common. You could also do stuff like turn KeepInventory on.
I played it back when it was really popular so I know what I'm getting into, not sure if they fully understand but that's part of the fun. Definitely leaving keep inventory on.
I started a Crucial 2 server with friends last month and I still haven't gotten bored. As a modpack conducive to roleplay and worldbuilding I'm very happy with it. That's something I like about modded Minecraft - that even the same modpack can appeal to so many playstyles.
Still Divine Journey 2. I made it to chapter 11. Its going slowly mostly because in the recent chapters recepies have gotten way more expensive which can be fixed by making automatic factories (as I like to call it) for important items which is fun but takes time. Also I got into this pack wanting to not put everything under the sun and make decent builds and those take a little bit of time as well. It may go even more slowly because I added ComouterCraft which the pack didn't had mostly because I had cool ideas but coding the cool stuff takes a lot of time. I also took a break for 2 weeks in December because Rain World got me hooked.
I picked up GregTech: New Horizons last week and having a blast even though I haven't even finished the stone age yet. The crafting is definitely brutal but not unfair like some other "expert mode" packs I've played, at least for now haha.
For now, I'm just taking over a walled village for a homebase until I learn more about what makes a good base location. Unfortunately, the inhabitants all committed mass suicide mob hugging party so I'm all alone :'(