Here's the deal, there's quite a few mods that add perks, right? So we have a wealth of new perk choices available to us, but limited opportunities to actually gain them, one every few levels without using mods or cheating. Even then some people have maximum level characters that they keep playing, but are unable to gain more perks except via the console or a cheat mod that just gives it to you.

What I am trying to figure out is if there is a way to allow the player to open up the menu to choose a new perk without having to level. Before anyone says that you could probably use the console to open the menu here's the catch, I want to tie in the acquisition of the new perk to one of three things: completing a repeatable quest (similar to the go kill X or do Y for reward quests), paying a very large amount of caps for an item that would open the menu and allow the selection of one perk per item purchased (one use item), or through a dialog option with an NPC 'trainer' that would take a similarly large amount of caps from you and let you choose a perk to get trained in.

This way level capped characters, or even non level capped characters that are able to get the required caps or complete the quest, would be able to obtain more perks rather than just at level or through cheating.

I believe that by having it open up the perk menu it would still impose all level, S.P.E.C.I.A.L., and skill requirements of each perk. You'd still have to meet the requirements, but wouldn't have to wait to level up.

I get what you're saying and I wish there was a function that could bring up the select a perk menu without leveling up too, but as far as I know there isn't.

One way you could do this (it would only work on a max level character because anything less would mess up the player's level) would be like if the level cap is 50 then if you're level 50 and you do the quest you get setlevel 49 then advlevel so they get back to 50 and get to choose some more skill points and a new perk. The thing is if you did this at like level 25 and did setlevel 24 and advlevel the setlevel command doesn't get the xp right so the player would end up losing xp so that's no good but at the max level it just says MAX so it would work.

One option is to create items that, once purchased, grant the player a perk, then go away. So, this guy would then sell these items, which you could title things like "toughness training" or whatever. IIRC, you can control what's in a seller's sales inventory through a list (form or leveled, I forget), which you can in turn modify with script. So, you could have something fire when player opens dialog with him, which updates his inventory to reflect the appropriate perks for sale. That, or create a dialog menu with every perk, but each only selectable if you meet the criteria of the perk as normal (not sure how the limited dialog thing works, though)

Awesome, thank you both for the advice. Seems this won't be quite as simple as I thought it would be, but then what is when modding? You've given me some food for thought and I'll need to do some more research and fiddle around in G.E.C.K. a bunch.

The only problem I foresee is if more perks are added via mods or DLC then I'd like to try and get this mod to be forwards compatible with the perks, automatically adding them to the lists.

There would have to be a way of listing all perks via script, and I haven't found a way to do that specifically. Perks don't seem to be grouped into any formlist. There might be something in NVSE for this, but I don't know.