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. Each career path has its own strengths and weaknesses, and scenarios unique to the class because of the skills associated with it. Each class also has its own distinct way to solve various in-game puzzles, which encourage replay: some puzzles have up to four different solutions. For instance, if a door is closed, instead of lockpicking or casting an open spell, the fighter can simply knock down the door. The magic user and the thief are both non-confrontational characters, as they lack the close range ability of the fighter, but are better able to attack from a distance, using daggers or spells. An example of these separate paths can be seen early in the first game. A gold ring belonging to the healer rests in a nest on top of a tree; fighters might make it fall by hurling rocks, thieves may want to climb the tree, while a magic user can simply cast the fetch spell to retrieve the nest, and then, while the fighter and magic user return the ring for a reward, the thief can choose between returning or selling the same ring in the thieves' guild (which is not available for those not possessing the "thieving" skills). It is also possible to build, over the course