Elders: Rule change

Colin and I are thinking of changing the way Willpower works in our game. In most of the tabletop games I've seen, people just really don't use Willpower apart from for powers that work off it. From my point of view, apart from just forgetting it's there, the main reason I don't use it is because you're supposed to only use it in intense, really important situations. But if you do, suddenly the intense, risky, important situation is suddenly far less risky and intense, because you've got an automatic success. Sure one automatic success won't be enough on it's own in many situations, but it does remove a lot of the pressure.

Thus we are considering semi-nicking something from Exalted - extra dice rather than auto success. To be precise, we're thinking of saying that rather than getting an extra success, you get three extra dice (/cards) added to your dice pool. This means on an normal difficulty roll you're actually slightly off on average, but it's not an automatic success.

What do people think? Is it a great idea? Or a terrible one? Is there a better way of doing it? And how do they make Ambrosia Cream Rice so creamy?