Ultima Online Begging - what it gives you, and the numbers uo.com never printed

What it does

Target an NPC and ask for money or goods. On a success you get gold coins or an item; on a failure you get nothing.

Two restrictions are published. The target must be in range, and the target must have a backpack — uo.com’s four canned responses are the clearest statement of the rules the skill actually has:

Outcome	Message
Success	“I feel sorry for thee… here have a gold coin”
Failure	“They seem unwilling to give you any money”
Out of range	“You are too far away…”
No backpack on the target	“There is little chance of getting money from that”

Every use lowers karma. uo.com states it but not by how much — the amount is small, but no number is published [!]. Since gold rewards are also published as scaling with karma level, the skill is quietly working against itself in a way uo.com does not quantify.

Elves in Heartwood donate items rather than gold. That is the one place the skill produces something other than coins on purpose. Items received that way are tagged “Acquired by Begging”; opening a bedroll permanently removes the tag.

There is also a long-standing display bug: a negative gold amount can appear as a stack of about 65,535 [!] “A Gold Coin”, and such a defective stack functions as a single coin for transactions.

The item tiers - and an unpublished variant

uo.com publishes a three-tier drop split: roughly 75% / 24% / 1%. Which items sit in which tier is not settled — an unpublished variant [!] moves some items up a tier. uo.com’s placement is given here, with the unpublished variant alongside rather than blended in — uo.com Begging.

Tier	Share	uo.com	Unpublished variant [!]
Common / Level 1	~75%	Water pitcher, French bread, lantern	Moves lanterns up to Level 2
Uncommon / Level 2	~24%	Pizza, bowl of stew, cheese, dates, shirt, pitcher of liquor	Adds lanterns; moves wine pitchers and bottles up to Level 3
Rare / Level 3	~1%	Wine, flower garland, bedroll, cookies, fishing pole, fish steak, turnip, sake	Lists wine pitchers and bottles, bedrolls, fishing poles, flower garlands and turnips here

The difference is narrow — it is about placement, not about the odds — and only the uo.com column is published. On a skill with this little documentation, a single misplaced lantern is a meaningful fraction of everything on record about it.

[!] No skill threshold is published for the tiers. Nothing published states that the 75 / 24 / 1 split shifts as Begging rises. A grandmaster beggar is not documented as getting better items than a novice one, outside Halloween.

Trick or Treat, which is the actual reason to train it

uo.com’s own framing of the skill rests entirely on one seasonal event, run annually since 2006. The Trick or Treat command grants either a random treat — candy — or a random trick, published as teleportation, recolouring or item theft.

The threshold is the only one the skill has:

Skill	What changes
100.0 (Grandmaster)	Unlocks the exclusive rare decorative items during Trick or Treat

That is the whole ladder. There is no 30, no 50, no 90 — nothing else is published at any value, and nothing about Begging changes on the way up except your chance of succeeding at all, which is itself not published as a formula. If you are training Begging for a reason other than roleplay, that Grandmaster row is the reason.

Caps, stats, mastery

It stops at 100. Begging does not appear on uo.com’s Scrolls of Power list, and there is no Power Scroll for it — there is no 105, no 110, no 120. It still counts in full against the 720 total skill cap.

Primary stat Dex, secondary Int — the only one of the four Miscellaneous skills with Dexterity as its primary. No mastery: Begging is not listed on uo.com’s Skill Masteries page.

No published PvP use of any kind, and no PvM use in the combat sense. The Heartwood item donations and the Grandmaster Trick or Treat decorations are the entire practical output of the skill as documented.

Training, and what it costs you

• Start with Gypsy NPCs, in Trammel or Felucca — uo.com specifies not Ilshenar. Gypsies in Britannia and at Gypsy Camps work too.
• Then use the skill on any NPC, from the skill list or a macro.
• Rotate targets when they stop paying. An NPC that is still giving gains can be targeted again and again; once it stops giving gains, switch to a different target.
• Train in Heartwood if you want the elf item donations instead of gold.
• Every attempt costs karma, for the whole length of the climb, with no published figure for the total.

The Guaranteed Gain System backstops it like any other skill, with a mandatory 0.1 when nothing has been gained inside your bracket’s window — 27.0 hours at 95.0–99.9 on a 700-point character — and a Scroll of Alacrity raising each check from 0.1 to 0.2–0.5 for 15 minutes.

What is not published

uo.com keeps a Begging page, which puts it ahead of Item Identification and Taste Identification. What that page does not contain is most of what a reader would want from it:

• [!] No gold amounts, at any skill level. All that is on record is that gold varies with karma. No range, no average, no per-skill figure.
• [!] No karma-loss value per use. uo.com states the loss but does not quantify it.
• [!] No success-rate formula and no difficulty model. There is no published way to say what your chance of a successful beg is at any skill level.
• [!] No list of which NPC types can and cannot be begged from, beyond the requirement that the target has a backpack.
• [!] No skill threshold for the item tiers.
• [!] No mechanical interaction with any other skill. The connections to Stealing and Snooping are thematic — shared roleplay ground and shared karma loss — and nothing published links them mechanically. The one cross-reference that exists runs the other way: uo.com’s Forensic Evaluation page names “blue beggar NPCs” as a training target, which is a fact about NPCs rather than about either skill.

Everything published about Begging amounts to a few hundred words, and that is the honest size of this skill.

Where these come from

uo.com Begging · uo.com Forensic Evaluation · uo.com Skills, Stats & Attributes · uo.com Scrolls of Power · uo.com Skill Masteries · uo.com Skill Gain Systems. Everything here is from uo.com or the game itself; anything uo.com does not publish is marked [!] as unpublished where it appears.