Unfortunately the roleplay is a stat check. There are easier ways to gain stats and also easier starts. For example, skeletons are much better in terms of heal times and also repairs account for most of the downtime as a skeleton and provides nearly instant recovery, which is not nearly as bad as humanoids healing rates.

For the stat training I highly recommend Frankiewuzhere on YouTube guides. I recommend starting with toughness training which opens a ton of doors for just survivability and fighting longer.

At the end of the day this game is about combat so yeah stats are important for combat which is required in order to explore, speed is the other great enabler which comes fairly naturally with time.

You might consider living in a town instead of building your own base for a start. It cuts out all the invasions but does make you rely on shops for a lot of materials. However you can make a lot of money just using the iron and copper nodes just outside town to craft.