[Shaira]

I've found the BRP psychic powers (psionics) to be very smooth to incorporate. As everyone's said, they're basically treated as skills, with PP cost, sometimes resistance rolls as required, and are loosely (and informally) divided into telepathy-type and telekinesis-type powers.

They're very flexible, and it's easy to incorporate new powers. Having said that, my gut feeling is to treat these much more as "special abilities" rather than spell powers, with characters having probably fewer of them than they would spells - sort of viewing them almost as skills. I've created a couple of psychic characters, and it's worked best when you start with a concept - IE this guy is a powerful telepath - and then choose the abilities to fit.

As far as usefulness is concerned, that depends on your own choices. Are they interoperable with magic, for example? IE, would Pyrokinesis be resisted by a Resist Fire type spell? Personally, if you don't let the other power systems (esp. sorcery and magic) get too overblown, psychic powers (telepathy, emotion control, mind blast, telekinesis, etc) stand to give character's very special powers.

The big thing is not to think of D&D psionics. They're nothing like - if anything they're maybe more comparable to the old Traveller psionics, or maybe even Space Opera (now that *was* a psionics system!).

Cheers,

Sarah