Are Telepathy psionic powers restricted to sapient beings creatures ?

[pawsplay]

Originally Posted by Deathwindfr

So basically telepathic psionic powers have no limits whatsoever in standard GURPS rules (unless they heve the Racial limitation cited in Psionic powers but that's supposed to be an exception).

A character with psionic powers can Telecontrol, Mind Blow or Suggest a zombie?

That depends on if zombies are a different class of mind in your game. Which, in a game where undead are fairly common, and are not affected by telepathy, they probably are. But there is no obvious reason that plague zombies wouldn't be susceptible, until they get get to the level they aren't intelligent enough. D&D zombies traditionally aren't "normal" beings and aren't affected by mental stuff, but that's a conceit of the setting. In some settings, telepathy works just fine on zombies or vampires or anything else.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Flowergarden

Depends, zombie template in gurps magic gives them Immunity to Mind Control. So I suppose you just give that advantage to everyone who logically should be immune to it

Intended to be immunity to the Mind Control college of magic, but of course Magic doesn't take into account the possibility that psi exists. It's a world building decision whether intelligences exist that are too "alien" to humans for the same type of telepathy to work on them. Digital Mind is an example of such an intelligence and there can be others. Zombies can be treated as a kind of magical automaton with programmed responses too simple to be treated as having a mind, or as having an Undead Mind advantage meaning you need a different kind of telepathy to affect it.

Of course it also could be the case that you could have a mind that can be controlled but it's thoughts are too weird to be understood, or possibly its mind could be read but you need to take a fright/confusion check.

[KarlKost]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

Intended to be immunity to the Mind Control college of magic, but of course Magic doesn't take into account the possibility that psi exists. It's a world building decision whether intelligences exist that are too "alien" to humans for the same type of telepathy to work on them. Digital Mind is an example of such an intelligence and there can be others. Zombies can be treated as a kind of magical automaton with programmed responses too simple to be treated as having a mind, or as having an Undead Mind advantage meaning you need a different kind of telepathy to affect it.

Of course it also could be the case that you could have a mind that can be controlled but it's thoughts are too weird to be understood, or possibly its mind could be read but you need to take a fright/confusion check.

I think that in such a case, the target creature will have some special trait that defines this "immunity" to normal telepathy. An AI for example has the Digital Mind trait as a mandatory trait (you simply aren't an AI without it), and that trait makes you immune to normal telepathy - while at the same time making you susceptible to a special type of telepathy that only affects machines.

If Zombies are immune to telepathy in your setting, then you'd have to grant them "immunity to telepathy" as a trait, or build it into their Undead template - and quite possibly, Vampires wouldn't have that (although individual Vampires may be more resistant to it, but that would be individual traits rather than their template), so I wouldn't generalize it to all Undead either

A Cthulhesque alien being could indeed have traits that induce Fright Checks, or even "Sanity" checks if you try to read their minds.