I'm trying to add a new racial ability that makes Intimidation and Persuasion attempts 25% easier, so I checked out the Persuasion and Intimidation perks to see how they work.

I see that Persuasion is setting PerksQuest to stage 60, and PerksQuest stage 60 is setting SpeechEasy, SpeechAverage, SpeechHard, and SpeechVeryHard with Papyrus. Imperial Luck also uses PerksQuest (stage 20). So I thought this would be easy. I'll just add a new stage (70) to PerksQuest that does the same thing as stage 60 except with the values that I want for this racial ability and copy and modify the existing Imperial Luck ability to set PerksQuest to stage 70 instead of stage 20.

Well, I added my stage 70, wrote in the papyrus fragments, copied the Magic Effect "RaceImperialLuckEffect" gave it a new ID and Name & left everything else the same, copied the ability "RaceImperial" and gave it a new ID and Name and changed the effect to my new effect, then added the ability to a race.

Well, of course it doesn't work because PerksQuest is not being set to 70 anywhere. I cannot find where this is being done for Imperial Luck. Does anyone know? Is there an easier way to do this?

Also, I'm totally stumped on how to make Intimidation easier. The Intimidation perk is set to Mod Player Intimidation as its entry point. I don't know how to do this with an ability.

The Perks quest is called from MQ102 in stage 5, first line of the stage fragment there. MQ102 is started at the end of the Helgen sequence, and/or as part of the game setup for an alt-start mod.

If you're going to modify the PerksQuest, you may as well just make your changes directly in Stage 20 so that they'll remain compatible behind the scenes with any alt-start mods that exist.