Even TOG ("The Old Game") had what they called Universal Inherent Powers (i.e. Brawl) and Origin Powers (i.e. Throwing Knives) which were a small collection of minor powers that were for all practical purposes "any time zero cost" powers.

The one thing that I always disliked about the Origin Powers back in TOG was the very fact that they were locked in place based on a character's origin. For instance if your character was a Science origin guy the game gave you the Tranq Dart power. There was no choice in the matter regardless of character concept. This actually motivated people to choose an origin for their character [b][i]regardless[/i][/b] of character concept just to get the exact power they wanted.

I always thought instead of being locked by origin the game could have provided a pool of say a dozen or so minor powers that a player would get to choose from during character creation. All of these powers could have been geared to be roughly equivalent so that no one power was significantly better than any other. That way a player could choose whichever power they wanted regardless of origin. The extra cool part of this is that the Devs could continually add to that pool of powers over time to provide for more choices and maybe there could be a way to get more than one of those powers as a character levels up. Basically this could be considered a superhero equivalent to the "cantrip" idea from D&D.