Okay. Basically what I'm trying to do is make a trait that gives the same bonus as Animal Friend with a drawback to balance it. Doing such, I need to be able to have the perk Animal Friend still worth it. Is there a way to make it so that with the player having said trait that Animal Friend Lv1 would act as Lv2, and Lv2 as a special Level 3 entry.

Also, how the heck does Animal Friend work? It seems to reference some Generic quest in the GECK. I'm new to all this, and so I'm a bit stumped.

Edit: Bah. I botched the title of the thread. Thanks for no option to change it. :facepalm: :brokencomputer:

Edit2: Thanks Donner.

I'm not sure if this is possible but if you could have this trait give players the actual perk you wouldn't need to mess around with it - players would be able to take it once later on and there's be no reason to consider a third.

I can't think of a good disadvantage, perhaps a penalty to charisma and speech to reflect trouble dealing with people?

Yeah. The thought was a -1 charisma penalty or some sort of penalty to speech, as charisma isn't really that big in the game itself. The possible features of a Lv3 Animal Friend are stumping me on the "thinking up things" side.
The big thing I'm having trouble with is figuring out how the GECK works as far as some of the references. Some seem to actively reference data pertaining to an ability they trigger, while others seem to at first glance reference ambiguous data.

animal friend perk works by using the setally function.

generic quest stage 20

; Triggered by the Animal Friend perk, rank 1; make the player friends with everybody in the AnimalFriendFactionSetAlly AnimalFriendFaction PlayerFaction 1 1

becareful thought, that using "RemovePerk" does not revert the effect, player has to manually type in the setally function to revert.

you could set your own quest and have a stage with

if you want a trait that starts with rank 1 of animal friend

you will have make a new quest with stage that has

"Player.Addperk AnimalFriend"

and instead of creating a rank 3 , create another separate perk that relates to animal friend, this is to avoid conflict later on with other mods.