It occurred to me as I'm running around, solving everyone's problems, be they massively complicated or completely inane, that it might be interesting to have a series in the story where we actively rebel against being the hero for a while. Where we tell the quest givers "go do it yourself!"

Loosely I'm thinking something like:

• Hero discovers a character that is especially meaningful in the beginning. A distant relative or friend (not romantic entanglement).
• Hero goes through a series of efforts to rescue this character, and fails. (No other quest givers in the area appear until this step in the story is completed.)
• Hero lashes out, giving sarcastic responses to quest givers, and maybe some of the quests involve NPCs re-appearing and begging for help or promising additional rewards. Certain quests just exist to allow you to say no, do something rude, etc.
• Quests in this area would have more options to "go wrong" and make "evil choices" where the NPCs that ask for help often don't get the results they want. Or some choices would both be negative because the hero is in a bad mood.
• At some point, someone we've helped before in an earlier story line learns the hero is struggling and starts to intervene.
• Meanwhile, of course, there is some massive, horrible thing coming to the area where we are questing, and we continue to refuse to help.
• Finally, we see the error of our ways, with the assistance from the NPC that came to intervene. Maybe we learn what happened was pre-ordained and we couldn't stop it.
• Just in time, we decide someone has to help all of these poor saps and finish the main quest story by thwarting the massive, horrible thing.

I'm not a lore expert so not sure if there would be anything problematic from that perspective, and if you don't do the whole area in order you could experience some quests where you as the hero is willing to help in other areas, but I don't think that would be any more immersion-breaking than some of the other things we sometimes come across throughout Tamriel.

And it might be fun to tell people to go take a hike for a while, and see them beg a little more.