Orius
Unrepentant DM Supremacist
Ah, the wonders of Skills & Powers psionic combat, aka "Stop hurting yourself!"
I really wonder what they were thinking with that one.In S&P, you needed to lower a target's PSPs to 0 to make contact with a closed mind and thereby be able to use telepathy on them. Basically, that's like saying a wizard is immune to magic until you strip them of all their spell slots. In order to reduce their PSPs, you needed to use attack modes to punch through their defenses. However, most of the attack modes cost more PSPs to use than the "damage" they'd inflict, so you'd hurt yourself more than your opponent.
More of TSR's lack of playtesting, I'll wager. The system later got some errata in Dragon Annual 2.