Yay! When?
(Oh, and the other thing that I'd change with CT is that Basic CG gives too few skills.)
I'd caution you on increasing the number of skills in CT. The problem is that the 2d6 bell curve is *extremely* sensitive to skill bonuses. So even a modest increase in the number of skills will make characters *far* more capable, which will require the referee to create far harder tasks in the adventures (or resign himself to running easy adventures). Also, more skills will tend to create significant skills overlap. Personally, I prefer for each character to be the best in the party at at least one useful thing. When *everybody* has Admin (for instance), this ideal is frustrated.
If I *had* to add more skills to the character generation system, here's what I think I'd do:
1. Keep the CT weapons skills as they are -- a skill for each discrete weapon. Sword and Blade are different skills. However, I'd give each character a level 0 in all weapons. I'd also let someone substitute a similar weapon skill (sword for blade, for instance), at -3. If you replace the CT skills with generalized skills ("one handed sword"), you make it *far* easier for characters to become experts at weapons. For instance, 6 points of skills don't go so far if you have to divide them between (say) Cutlass, Dagger and Foil. But if you had a generic One Handed Sword skill, the character would be +6 in all of these weapons (and in Sword and Blade).
That said, I am not as worried about "skills bloat" with melee weapon skills because the defender gets to subtract his weapon skill from the attacker's roll. So a battle between two highly skilled warriors will still be pretty dramatic (i.e., no one hits virtually automatically).
2. Limit the *number* of non-melee weapon skills that can be obtained at level 3+ to 2 skills. This will prevent the "expert at everything" problem that can arise in Book 4+ character generation systems.
3. Consider limiting the maximum task roll bonus for skills to a *net* modifier of +3. This means that the maximum bonus,
after applying all modifiers for difficulty is +3. I'd ignore this rule in non-stressful situations -- making a potion in a laboratory rather than in the dungeon, for instance.
Note: In a "roll 8+ system, a +3 will result in a success 84% of the time. A +4 results in success 92% of the time. It's fairly easy to get modifiers this high if you use the character generation systems in Books 4+. A simpler approach would be to make rolls of 4- an automatic failure. That will ensure a small, but significant chance of failure no matter how good you are. Again, I wouldn't apply this to non-stressful situations.
(Not me though, I wanna play in it for a while before I try running it.)
If you want to do it via play-by-post here or pbem, then count me IIIIINNNNNN!
