CP2020, P-o-t-S a o t P-o-t-P, re:Skills

Cyberpunk 2020 Role-Playing Game, and how I can be Part-of-the-Solution, as opposed to Part-of-the-Problem in regards to Skills and Skill Points. In other words, here's a house-rule to proactively reduce point-weaseling and encourage realistic diversification of minor skills. In other other words, I'm doing something positive about it, instead of just bitching some more.

Problem: Cyberpunk 2020 skill and character creation system leaves characters lacking in either game-relevant or background-relevant skills. Namely, it's all too easy to accidentally make a character without the basic skills granted by a C-average in high-school. 2020's relatively slow rate of advancement, coupled with high character mortality rate, makes backfilling unappealing. As a result, it's also quite easy to make a well-rounded and realistic character who utterly lacks any focus and thus gets upstaged by the point-weasels.

Solution Parameters: Add a small number of skills points to all CP2020 characters. It needs to be done in a way that doesn't allow for point-weasels and min-maxers to score a huge benefit out of it. Therefore, just granting extra skillpoints to spend willy-nilly is right out. Instead we need a system that rounds out the character, allows for a tiny bit of individuality in doing so, and doesn't stack with a character's areas of expertise.

Implementation: Assign skill points as follows:

1. Career Skills: 40 points, as per normal.
2. Automatically gets points in the Education & General Knowledge skill equal to 1/2 their Special Ability rating or 1/3 their Emp or Tech score, whichever is highest. Round up in all cases, so the PC will end up with Ed&GenKnow rating of 1 to 5 - allowing a spread from grade school to masters degree.
3. Pickup skills: assigned as per the rulebook, based on Intelligence and Reflexes.
4. Make sure that any random skill points gained via Life Path have been accounted for.
   
5. After all other skill points have been assigned, allow the player to pick 6 skills that they currently have rated at zero. Those six skills are boosted from 0 to 2. For these 6, they cannot choose skills with a Difficulty Modifier of 2 or more, and they cannot chose skills they've already spent points on. The goal is to fill in minor rifts between character concept and point budgets, not to radically boost character power.