[Design] Psychic Powers Unleashed!

Work on The Awakening hit a lull for a week or so, due to the sheer number of good hockey games on TV. But, now that it's the all-star break (22 goals in a game? Wtf?), I can get back to work.

And you can bet I'm looking forward to it. Because now, I get to work on the nitty-gritty - psychic powers.

The main design theme of this competition was "magic", so it makes sense that the supernatural should be a big theme in my post-apocalyptic RPG... and I'm almost ashamed that it's taken me almost a month to get to it!

I'm not going to go into huge detail on my game... because I'm tired and my hands hurt. Instead, I'll give some insight into the design process of psychic powers in my RPG.

When I designed powers, I followed a few main goals:

1) Powers are not balanced against one another. I love games where you can get either cool powers ("ooo! Drain Life!") or kind of lame powers ("ugh.... Heal Other.") Essentially, this difference in power makes those cool powers all the more interesting.

2) Powers improve as skills. Since The Awakening is based around improving skills one percentage point at a time, powers have to follow the same approach. In the game, there are four psychic skills. As they improve, you unlock new uses for existing powers. Also, if you have multiple powers keyed off the same skill, as you improve that skill, all the keyed powers improve! This encourages players to specialize, leading us to rule #3...

3) PCs can get new powers. If you roll a random crappy power, you're not stuck with it. There is a mechanic in place that makes acquisition of new powers possible, if difficult.

4) Powers are useful inside and outside of combat. If a power is only usable in a fight, it's not in my game. There is no Magic Missile in The Awakening. Likewise, if a power can only be used outside of combat, it is also out - so, no Clairvoyance (at least, not as commonly seen in D&D). A character's power should be something that can be creatively employed to overcome obstacles, whether or not the character is dodging hot lead.

5) Powers should be important, but not all-important. One time, when I was playing Dark Sun, I had a friend make a Half-Giant Gladiator. He built this character around being an uber-melee character, and was looking forward to playing this former slave-turned explorer. Then, he rolled his wild talent.... and got disintegrate.
While this character would draw his blade and fight with the best of them, whenever things got bad, the giant would use Disintegrate to essentially end the encounter. He'd take some damage, and zzzZZZZZAP! The rampaging Mekillot was dead, and the group just earned some nice XP. Essentially, the half-giant had a "get out of jail free" card.
This is something I want to avoid in The Awakening. Powers can be very useful for a a creative player, but they cannot be a gimmick that is resorted to every encounter, ad nauseum.

6) Powers should encourage creative play. This one is simple to write down, but hard to implement at times. How do you make a power that encourages creative play? Basically, every time I get a power idea, I try to think of at least five different uses for that power (knowing that if I can think of five, there are probably fifteen more that I didn't think of). If I can't think of five, then the power is out.