I've been playing D&D since the late eighties. My gaming group has lost and gained a number of players since that time, but one friend I played with has been in most of my groups since then. He and I had a Krynn campaign for 2E that we played and got our characters up to 20th level by the early 90's with. Later with 3E, we tried to play them at epic level for a bit before it got stupid. We really liked the characters and were talking about how much fun it was to play them but how they were too high level...so we decided to reboot them.
We were going to start them over at level 1 in the same setting at the same time we started them the first time.
We realized we're much better at the game than we were, much better DM's, and the setting and the mechanics are soooooo different that it might still be entertaining.
So we re-rolled our characters and started over. We've take turns GM'ing. We vaguely remembered some of the adventures we went through before, but we are reworking them so they are more mature and what happened before serves as more of a baseline. Sometimes the same thing that happened before pretty much happens. Most of the time it's been retooled and is more an homage to our "pretend memories" in a clever way. Occasionally we do the opposite and use the previous experience as a red herring.
I have to say it has been awesome. The rough blueprint of the previous experience actually helps a ton to build our stories out of. Many of the NPC's and Some of the villains return, and some of the more ridiculous things we did also make an appearance if for nothing else than a good laugh (like how Bobo was in the Clash of the Titans remake.) It was long enough ago that no one feels like we're "just doing it again." We make different choices and the outcomes can have interesting consequences. The characters are developing in different ways. My wizard is about to take his test and he might not be the same robe he was the first time!
Anyway I was curious if anyone has tried this. After so many video games where you can start over and make different choices, it seemed like it might work. It's been very rewarding and I wanted to share.