The gameplay standards established in earlier Sierra adventure games are enhanced by the player's ability to choose the character's career path from among the three traditional role-playing game backgrounds: fighter, magic-user/wizard and thief. Further variation is added by the ability to customize the Hero's abilities, including the option of selecting skills normally reserved for another character class, leading to unique combinations often referred to as "hybrid characters". During the second or third games, a character can be initiated as a Paladin by performing honorable actions, changing his class and abilities, and receiving a unique sword. This applies when the character is exported into later games. Any character that finishes any game in the series (except "Dragon Fire", the last in the series) can be exported to a more recent game ("Shadows of Darkness" has a glitch which allows one to import characters from the same game), keeping the character's statistics and parts of its inventory. If the character received the paladin sword, he would keep the magic sword (Soulforge or Piotyr's sword) and special paladin magic abilities. A character imported into a later game in the series from any other game can be assigned any character class, including Paladin.