Your goal as a player should be to use mind-reading to engage more with the setting and situation, not less. Your goal as GM and game designer should be to set up and consistently apply a concept of telepathy that promotes that. (Not to minimize its impact on the developing story. If you can't help but want to do that at every turn, just axe telepathy altogether.)
#Limitations should be awesome
As far as I'm concerned, when mind-reading sucks, it's not because players can use it to do crazy stuff. It's because they can use it to do not-very-crazy stuff in a deeply avoidant fashion. So, mind-reading should be crazy, big, important. It should be transgressive and intimate.
Take a look at how Apocalypse World does the Brainer — like, literally just go look at the character sheet on the site (PDF link, pg. 5-6), because there is no better example.
Brainer moves generally fall into two categories:
"Your victim has to be able to see you, but you don't have to interact" or just doing whatever the action is normally — These are for weird versions of regular abilities everybody has. Fighting's fighting; allowing a character to fight someone with their brain instead of a gun really isn't that big a deal.
"When you have time and physical intimacy with someone — mutual intimacy like holding them in your arms, or 1-sided intimacy like they're restrained to a table" and "If you and another character have sex" — Now these, these are for the unique things that the Brainer does, prying out your deepest secrets and manipulating you like a puppet.
This emphasis on intimacy is critical for making the Brainer a character that fits into Apocalypse World and its themes:
- It's what creates the sense of transgression. The powers and the constraints together create the feeling of violation and betrayal.
- It makes the Brainer an engaged and active character. They get in your brain by getting in your face, not watching you from afar.
- It gives other characters something to do around the Brainer. Having a heart-to-heart with a Brainer is some scary shit (so's being mugged by one), but you can still look the Brainer in the eye like any other person. You don't have to be all like, "Don't ever be near them or even let them know you exist" when dealing with the telepath.
- It creates a real temptation to use the powers. If I can just brain-pry anyone whenever I feel like it, I don't think much of not doing so. But if I need time and intimacy, well, suddenly I'm looking at those moments as golden opportunities — if I let this one pass by, when will I get to do it again?
Well-placed limits are, above all, evocative. They define a character as much as the powers do. They tempt you to push the situation to your advantage. Sometimes they tempt you to push the limits themselves (note the violation glove).
