Well, I've had my first game, and things did not go well. I thought you all should deserve an update after all your great help with this character.
Before starting, I made sure the DM had a few days to look over my character sheet. I discusses exactly what the character would be capable of, and asked him to approve all the epic spells I used. Everything was easily approved, which worried me. Most DMs will ban a few things. Still, the DM seemed to really want to run a high-powered campaign. I also explained that the character was willing and able to attack any sort of evil, including gods.
Tonight, we started. We began in a prison where we had been kept for 5 years. No explanation about how the demons had kept us from escaping for that long. We were just told to "move along". The DM also explained that the "random magic" effects only caused spells to have random damage types, which only affected my healing spells, so I wasn't concerned any more about spells.
In the party we had some sort of nymph, an archer, and a lich wizard of some sort. Although I asked many times (before and after character creation), I wasn't told why I might cooperate with a lich, only that it "wasn't a problem". Hmm. I wish I'd known about this before making a saint/cleric/paladin.
Moving along. The escape was simple, we just punched an orc guard in the face. Proceeding to the armory, we quickly regained our gear, and ran outside, only to meet... Tiamat! And three invisible Succubi.
I was quite excited. A worthy battle! I would probably die, but maybe those chains tying Tiamat down would keep her from using her most powerful spells. The group charged in to fight. The succubi dropped first, and quickly. Tiamat began pleading, "help me" and saying how we needed her to escape the prison. A quick Detect Evil determined that, yes, in fact, she was Evil, so I attacked. A few previous whacks had revealed that Tiamat's AC was insanely high, so I put eveything I could into attack bonus, Giant Sized, and whacked away with Time Stands Still. And here, the problem began.
Apparently, we weren't supposed to attack Tiamat. The DM was (I think?) upset that I could hit her 100 touch AC (barely) , and that I could do enough damage to kill her. She saved herself via some sort of Alter Reality thing, and retaliated for 200 damage (untyped, unrolled). At this point I was growing worried that I had brought the wrong character into this campaign... but I didn't have time to ask the DM what he expected from me, because he suddenly quit.
In any case, that's it. About 40 hours of character creation gone, some really nice spreadsheets, etc. Le sigh. I really wish I had some way of telling what kind of power level a DM expects for their game, because certainly asking them doesn't seem to work.