Dekar:
Merry Christmas. Are you restarting this?
What an excellent question... The one thing I know for a fact is that, if I do, I will be clearer on the goals - not just to the players, but to myself as well.
What happened was, when i started out I had a general outline of what I wanted to accomplish, but no specifics. That's what I mean by "being clearer to myself" with the goals.
As the game progressed, I figured the specifics out: the best way to allow the players to shape the universe would be to actually make them design each encounter - by having them recount an "adventure" from their characters' personal stories.
This would shape the "arena" for their "encounters", and the encounters themselves would shape the world. Obviously I would then adjust the encounters, which would be approximately 20 levels behind in terms of CR, to the actual group that was facing them.
Only, I didn't quite inform the players as to why their "background" stories would be important, nor did I get the necessary feedback. You may remember how well that turned out.
So, yeah. If there is interest in restarting the game, I'll start an entirely new thread with a "the story so far" reintroduction. I will also probably look for a couple of players to reinforce our numbers, depending on how many people are still around and decide to give it a second go, as well as add a couple of house rules to try and streamline encounters.
One of them will be way of handling the encounters that will allow players to finish each round without having to wait for me, by summing up the results of what happened.
It's a bit tricky, because so much of Pathfinder is predicated around combat mechanics, and the premise of the game is that these characters are incredibly powerful entities that are, by their actions, shaping a world, which, put together, effectively means that the PCs' encounters are what shapes the world.
And that means the encounters are supposed to be epic in scope and execution, which is a bit tricky when you are playing by the "balance uber alles" pathfinder rules rather than, I don't know, Exalted or something.