"And all his former comrades led a happy life, protected from every danger by the powerful god which charname became, until the end of their time, and when they died, the joyfully reunited with the powerful beeing who was once their comrade on the prime plane." - uh oh, why not...? I get the feeling the epilogues are made artificially sad...
One need look no further than the outrage over plenty of
PC-STAYS epilogues to get the answer to this question, and I speak as one who has now penned double-digit BG2 epilogues*:
It is very, very difficult to accurately depict what the player thinks their character will go on to do with their life.It's hard enough to do with romance epilogues. Accounting for all of the friendship possibilities would be very difficult, and in essence require a bunch of TOB conversations like "So, we're always gonna be pals, right?"... and appreciating as well that, just like high school, even those we promise most fervently to always stay close to may drift away.
Consider the Jaheira and Viconia romance endings. People (myself included) have screamed bloody murder over Gaider's assertion that our PCs and Jaheira did not have a terribly close-knit relationship, which is particularly noticable in his Ascension variant of the epilogue. And people have screamed bloody murder over the assertion that their PCs couldn't save Viconia.
I've heard some pushback on one of my new Jaheira epilogues along the lines of the Viconia argument ("My PC would NEVER let that happen! He is too uber!") but the bitch of it is, if you want to tell a story about the PC in the epilogue, you either have to write a TON of them and find a reasonable way to bring that out in dialogue, or you have to just take a good guess at what the PC is like, go with it, and roll with the punches. And sometimes they fly at your face faster and harder than others.
So, you pick your poison. I decided to assert some things about the PC for my Kelsey and Jaheira epilogues, and I've gotta take my lumps over it. Wes decided to more or less slot the PC into "The Solaufein Epilogue" which is actually a nice way to solve the problem, in a way.
*(okay, okay, 3 of the 11 are pretty similar, but that's still not bad, and I'm GONNA write more, so I'll be in legit double digits soon!)
[!--EDIT|jcompton|Dec 18 2002, 11:51 AM--]