Min/Max Boards

If my character is evil and a lynch mob comes after her, and she has the power, she's going to blow them up just because.

If my character is good and a lynch mob comes after her, and she has the power, she'll try to reason with them but if they don't listen, they get fried, because while I may have the power, next time it may be some innocent low-level caster that can't defend themselves well enough, and murdering someone simply because they have an ability you don't is unquestionably Evil, meaning the mob is behaving in an Evil manner and I'm justified in killing them to protect others.

I'm not sure I can think of a situation in which the majority of my characters would do something other than flee if weak, or kill if strong.  Now, granted, in such a setting my characters would probably take the Invisible Spell feat and apply it to every single spell, since it's a +0 metamagic, but if and when there's rabble after them...

I'm building a Druid, and I don't want to go quite as far as taking that exceedingly powerful Fleshraker Dinosaur as either a primary wildshape form or my animal companion.  I would like to get something I can enhance with Venomfire that is a tad less excessively powerful than the Fleshraker.  Are there any good choices that are solid and also have poison?  Particularly around level 5, but higher levels matter too so I can upgrade as needed.

2nd Edition was much lower-magic than 3.5, so taking some hints from there might be good.  For example:

2nd Edition mages were limited on how many spells of each level they could have in their spellbook, by their intelligence.  This limit could be applied to all casters in a low-magic setting.  Rather than hitting 'all' when you got to superhuman intelligence (raising ability scores was much harder; when you hit 19 int that limit would go away for a 2nd edition wizard and you can then scribe all spells) just have the limited number continue to grow slowly all the way up as int (or wis, for primary wis casters) increases.  Suddenly no caster can know all spells, they must pick and choose.  Add to that spells themselves being rarer and harder to come by, and caster power suddenly drops a whole lot as compared to the magic-mart worlds of 3.5 where the wizard is just going to buy scrolls of all the good spells next time he goes to town.  Additionally, specializing didn't allow you to choose your opposition schools.  Wizards would be somewhat weaker if specializing in Conjuration automatically banned Transmutation, and vice versa, for instance.

As for magical items...well, another 2nd Edition limitation might help there.  First, magical item creation was harder, you had to get specialized components (determined by the DM - making a magical item was basically a blank check for the DM to send the party on adventures to gather the toenail of a cloud giant and the eyeball of a medusa and whatnot) and then you had to cast Permanency - which permanently removed one point of constitution from the caster.  And since stats were also harder to raise...  Suddenly magic items become very rare because nobody wants to permanently lose stats.

Granted, neither of these methods is going to be effective or balanced on its own, but they might be an interesting place to start.  This allows things to be possible while making them more difficult.  An equally large difficulty is balancing the monsters, and I think it may simply not be worth trying to adapt D&D to this sort of thing.  As others have said, there are other games that are inherently lower-magic than 3.5 - including AD&D 2nd Edition itself.

I'm planning to build an Erudite to play soon, hopefully.  Going to avoid the Spell to Power variant since that's just so overpowered I don't feel I would be capable of playing down to the rest of the party without constantly second-guessing myself.  I'm trying to work out a good build without going too far, but I'm often not a good judge of what 'too far' is.

Right now, my biggest question would be, what the best Favored Discipline to pick would be.  Or possibly what the two best ones, since favored discipline trades bonus feat, and the free psicrystal is referred to as a bonus feat, meaning that depending on the interpretation, you might have two bonus feats to trade for favored disciplines.  I'm leaning toward Psychometabolism being the best, but some other opinions on that would be welcome.  As for the second best, I'm unsure.  Telepathy seems good since it allows Schism access at 7th level instead of 9th, as well as access to Metaconcert at 9th instead of 11th.  Plus the telepathy is very thematic for psionics, so there's that.  However, Clairsentience and Metacreativity both have their draws (such as access to Genesis before epic in Metacreativity, or Metafaculty in Clairsentience).  Cross-referencing discipline to the other class's lists is somewhat annoying since I know of no listing of psionic powers by discipline.  ...maybe I'll wind up making one.

I should note that for this particular character, it'll be starting at low level (3-4) and I'm unsure how high the campaign might go.  But I'm also interested in general erudite building for the future as well.

Might as well post something just to make sure my account doesn't get deleted.  I've lurked around on the old boards on occasion for quite a while, and I'll probably mostly lurk around here too.

Let's see, my favorite RPG's are D&D, pretty much.  3.5 for the most part, although I occasionally wax nostalgic for some of those old 2nd Edition memories.
Beyond that my hobbies are pretty much computer games of varying types, which tend to get a lot more play although I like D&D better, simply due to logistical issues.
I live in California, in the Los Angeles area.

Let's see if I actually talk much this time around on the boards.  Heh.