10 Times You Were An Utter Dick To NPCs
3. Terrible Spouse, Terrible Parent - The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, being one of the most successful open-world RPGs of all time, offers a lot of ways to be morally bankrupt. But nothing hits home like... well, home life.
In Skyrim, it's possible to marry a decent number of NPCs. And, just like in real life, you can be a cruel gold digger who selects their spouse not on how you like their personality so much as what's in it for you. Some spouses will cook meals for you, some will set up shops for you and the best of the bunch can be recruited as extremely useful travelling companions who will join you in combat.
Or, you can absolutely marry a would-be adventurer or warrior and then just leave them at home whilst you go galivanting around the world. There's something truly cruel about snuffing the spirit and potential out of an NPC this way.
If you want to truly be a despicable person though, you can lumber your partner with your adopted kids. But surely adopting orphans is a good deed? That is, of course, forgetting that if you kill an NPC with kids that their poor offspring will be sent to an orphanage.
So you can take in the kids of the parents you murdered, like some kind of villain in that child's heroic origin story.
Unless they're the kids of Lemkil. Offing this grouchy git and saving his progeny is always morally correct.