Fearabbit

I thought we had a nice discussion going on. I'm also pretty sure I understand your point, I just don't agree with it. Not based on a "I don't mind if it doesn't make sense" level, which should be obvious from the points I made. You said that muscles are bound by physical laws, and that's true. I was saying: so is anything else with which you could control magic in any way as a person. Your intellect is a bunch of neurons in your brain, so is your willpower and your wisdom. The voice you use to speak magical incantations is a physical thing. The finger movements, the concentration you require, everything is somehow bound by physical laws. And I'd really like to hear your argument concerning this. Maybe I missed it in your posts before, in that case I'm sorry. But I feel that if this discussion needs closure somewhere, it's concerning this point. Personally I felt I adressed your posts and your arguments and tried to clear up misunderstandings, so it hurts me a bit to hear you say I ignored your points or tried to twist them in any way (which wasn't my intention at all). Drop me a personal message if you don't feel like bringing it all up again here in this thread.

I read many books set in the middle ages when I was a kid. I liked them because I liked knights and stuff. I also read fantasy books and liked them because they had a similar setting, but everything was so fantastic and magnificent. The hero was just a kid/teen, but he was the Chosen One. And sometimes all seemed lost, but then something truly amazing happened. So I started liking the genre very much because I liked awesome things, and also knights and kings. The question is, how did my taste evolve and change over the years? Well, I really like some philosophical dilemmas that arise from the setting. Suppose you KNOW there are gods... would you question them? Strive to kill them even? Stuff like that. But all in all... I like different things now than I did as a kid, but mostly it's still "awesome things". There has to be more lore behind them to satisfy me, but I'm still amazed by the idea of floating cities, enormous magical beasts, wars waged with wizards, evil vampires and so on. I don't really want to *be* that kind of amazing character myself. Never found that interesting. I've always prefered to be a non-magical fighter in games myself, and I don't really want to be the Chosen One. So I don't think it's personal wish fulfillment. It also definitely doesn't have to be a medieval settinf anymore. I like almost anything from ancient times to sci-fi in a fantasy setting. But the more modern it becomes the more obscure and subtle the magic has to be.

Hehe. Yeah I don't like helmets either. In fact, I don't really like armor at all. I certainly wouldn't mind getting rid of it by using a more modern setting - 16th/17th century. I'd love to play as one of the Three Musketeers, basically. I'd love a game full of swashbucklers and magic, absolutist Emperors and political intrigue, and without any magical rings. But I think there's a difference between the time period a fantasy setting resembles, and the fantasy rules it chooses for itself. The former is more bound by reality (or what we've come to think of as the reality of that period), so we expect knights in shining armor when we have a medieval-ish setting. But I see no reason why a game has to have magical rings. The Witcher didn't have them (unless I'm mistaken), and people didn't mind. So... that's what I mean. If the game has to have magical rings, at least keep it at a minimum, but personally I'd prefer a setting where they don't appear at all.

But I do want to maximize my potential. I just don't want to use jewellery for that. And I don't see why I should have to. Because Tolkien made a book about a magical ring once? So now every fantasy setting needs magical rings? I mean, the answer to the chainmail bikini problem shouldn't be "so don't wear armor when you play a woman', either. I voted for 2 rings, by the way. I can live with that, no problem, but I'd prefer a system without magical rings and definitely wouldn't want one where you can wear 10 of them.

The big problem for me is that I hate rings, necklaces and earrings. Not just in games but in real life too, I think they're yucky. And I don't usually like how they look, especially if you wear dozens of them. You know? A guy with 8 rings and three necklaces is someone I'd find inherently unsympathetic. And the first image that comes to mind is that of a slimy rich merchant. I don't want to play such a character. I don't want to be forced to in order to maximize my potential. It's bad enough I have to wear two rings and an amulet in most RPGs. For me there's a huge difference between playing the character I wan lt to play, and playing the same character with jewellery.

That's the whole point I was making. You can't have 4=5 in a logical world such as ours, which is exactly why we don't have magic. Please read that part of my post again, it wasn't saying "4=5? I see no problem with that!", it was saying "Everytime you put magic on top of reality, you produce a 4=5 situation, so your only choices are to either accept that, or to not have magic at all". The 4=5 thing is obviously a metaphor, though. A general statement that there's a paradox, not the specific case of having 4 apples in your basket that are also 5 apples. Though that situation is one that wouldn't be implausible in a world where everything we know is turned upside down because of magic. The point of magic is to change the laws of physics in a way that would produce a paradox in our world. And I'm not saying that in defense of the "muscle strength = magic" setting, but in defense of any fantasy setting with magic in it. There is no difference at all between casting magic with your physical strength and casting magic with your mental strength when talking about whether that system makes sense or not. Neither of them makes sense in the real world, no matter how well you explain it. Also, I think you're constantly switching between two questions: "Is it a logical implementation?", and "Is it balanced?". The answer to the first question is "no, and it can never be", and the answer to the second question is "a fantasy setting doesn't have to be balanced in any way, only a game has to be balanced". A system where mental and physical power rely on the same stat may well be unbalanced, but it is not less logical than any other fantasy setting. If it's more efficient to use magic to plow your field instead of doing it by hand, and all farmers have the ability to use magic without problems, then in that setting I guess farmers plow their field with magic. Now where's the logical fallacy in that?

I don't like "Chronicles" in titles. It always sounds as if what I'm about to experience isn't relevant anymore, just an old tale that the historians can analyze for hints of a civilization long gone. Same goes for "Legend of". What, so this didn't actually happen this way? Nothing but a good fairytale? I don't want to experience this as if it's long past and doesn't matter. I want to play in the present. I want "Current Events of Eternity". "Chapter One: Breaking News from Dyrwood".

Just a quick response to Lephys: You made lots of real world comparisons and also mentioned physics. You think there's a problem when magical energy is connected to something physical like muscle contraction. To which I say, there's no way to avoid that because literally everything in our world is "physics". In DnD and many other settings, wizards utter incantations to create magic. But that's just sonic waves! Particles in the air that are oscillating. How can that lead to magic? For every implementation of magic you will find something disconcerting like this, because magic can't exist in the real world. You always have a 4=5 equation somewhere, because you take the real world and put something new on top. If, as in your example, muscles made us geniuses, then in that world we wouldn't even look human. Your whole biological system works differently if the brain is scattered all over the body. You wouldn't need a head to store the brain and the most important senses in. But the setting wouldn't reflect this. 4=5. The point is that if you look deep enough, none of these settings make any sense from a scientific perspective. And it's not ranked - they all don't make any sense in exactly the same way. The question is how obvious it is to you.

Not a problem at all. Well maybe the wizard won't suck at swordfighting, but he's gonna have more skill in spellcasting, and he's not gonna have the benefits from the fighter class. So using the sword telekinetically, he may be able to do some damage, but he's essentially giving up the potential power he would have if he used his magic in a different way, which would be more effective. That's what I meant. On the other hand, now that you've planted this image in my head of a feeble mage telekinetically wielding a huge greatsword and dealing massive damage, I think it's kind of awesome. :D You had me with Toph. I was thinking of all the other warrior-like benders. So, bad example, my bad. But I think it doesn't change the point I'm trying to make. Sorcery in most fantasy settings is dependent on your willpower, a mental ability. The more you can concentrate on these magical energies, the more you can shape them to your liking. Your body has nothing to do with it, and the magic is just... there, I guess. Now imagine this: A fantasy setting in which the magic you want to use is not just there, it has to be created first, or accumulated in your body. And that could happen in many ways. One of them, just as an example: By contracting your muscles and becoming very, very tense, you open up the magical flow in your body, and the magic that is present in each and every cell of your body can flow into your chakras, where it can be accessed. It's a stupid example but I just want to emphasize that magic can be anywhere in a fantasy setting. In this case it means: The stronger the muscles are that you contract, the more magic flows, so you need strength to become a spellcaster. In that scenario it also wouldn't have anything directly to do with physics. It's just a correlation that you can also use your strength to generate more physical force when striking someone. And you wouldn't need to punch someone to burn them, either - it's not the physical force that causes the magic to happen. And while a wizard would have mastered using his body strength to this effect, a fighter would have mastered using it for direct combat. I'll go even further: The fighter has to move while fighting, which disrupts the magical flow, so that he cannot access it. The wizard has to stand still and cannot fight. Thus, the very same basic attribute represents both a spiritual and a physical strength because they are linked, even though they are fundamentally different in how you use them. (Again, a reminder that I don't prefer a system like this. I just don't think it is inconceivable or that it wouldn't make sense - within the logic of its own fantasy setting it could make perfect sense.)

Well, I said "they shouldn't be different in many situations". Big difference. And my assumption right now is that warriors can't cast spells while wizards can't fight as well as a warrior. If a warrior could convert his muscle strength into magic, then he wouldn't be a warrior in this system, he'd be a wizard, and he wouldn't be trained in close combat but in spellcasting. ("What would stop a wizard from telekinetically wielding a sword?" - Why a telekinetic sword? He can just pick up a sword and fight with that. But his high Power stat won't help him in either case, because he still sucks at swordfighting.) I'm playing the devil's advocate here because I hope the system will be different, but: if warriors and wizards gain their strength from a single stat that is a combination of Willpower (mental) and Strength (physical), then they're still fundamentally different because they were trained differently. That's the idea behind classes, you've been trained in a certain kind of combat and while you have some wiggle room when you level up, you basically carry on with your training. Put differently, yes - the warrior has all the necessary requirements for becoming a wizard. Only, he didn't. A long time ago. So now he uses these same requirements for something entirely different. And concerning the example with blasting in the door as a level 1 wizard: You're thinking in DnD terms again when you say that 18 INT won't help there. The "Power" stat doesn't mean "For a wizard this is equivalent to 18 INT". It means literally that your magical aptitude is at its maximum. Level 1 or no, your magic is strong enough to blast through that door. Because, in response to your "nothing dictates that a wizard's telekinetic force is equal to the physical force of a warrior just because he's magically powerful"... the game could dictate that, if it wanted to. It's a new kind of abstraction, and the game could basically say exactly that with its Power stat. In Avatar, the people who bend the elements are pretty buff guys, trained in martial arts and all that jazz. There are still sword masters and other fighters who can win a fight against them, even if their physical strength isn't so different from one another. But one person relies on his Earthbending or whatever, while the other relies on his sword. In Avatar, that's basically the whole difference. Like I said, if we stop thinking in DnD terms then many of these objections vanish. "But what if I want to play a weak, intelligent, powerful mage?" Well, if you can't do that because magic requires physical strength, then sorry, not possible. Doesn't mean the system doesn't make sense, just that it's different. All that being said, I wouldn't be happy about all that either. I like the classical attribute system. Which is why I like my proposition of tying different aspects of spellcasting to all the attributes so much. Magic shouldn't be an ability tied to nothing but Intelligence, because then we can't use Intelligence for "intelligent behavior in stuff other than magic" anymore without breaking the system and overpowering wizards. But seriously, that system up there in my other post? I just might have to make a game with that, I kinda want to see it. (Though it does raise the question... if every attribute is, in its own way, as helpful as all the others... then why bother distributing points differently? Wizards really give me a hard time with their exclusive spellcasting. I'd love for STR to simply make the character stronger and have that be beneficial enough to make it a good decision.)

Osvir, it's a simple concept, but the code involved is starting to become quite long and complex (for what is essentially a vanity feature). The less restrictions you have, the more conditions must be considered. 4 health states, 1 death state, 7 effect states means 29 portraits per original portrait. And there has to be code for all that - a priority queue that also has to take special circumstances into account. And don't forget, 6 party members means you need at least 6 of these sets available... if all companion portraits and all PC portraits are available, that's something like 900 individual portraits that have to be done by the community. If you don't want this to be a feature only for the select few who can photoshop. It's certainly possible but I just think that moderation would be better.

Getting complicated. :D Personally I'd prefer just having different portraits for 0, 25, 50, 75 and 100% health. I've never been a fan of overly visualized conditions. Might and Magic was always a bit... campy in that regard? Besides, where do you stop? NWN2 had visuals for most spells too, so the druid companion constantly looked like a wooden blob because of the protection spell she used.

Very interesting points being made here. I'd just like to say a couple of points that might be worth considering: 1. Strength checks are often based in our real world way too much. Have no rogue and want to open that door? You can bash it in with Strength, but cannot blast it open with a force wave. Want to intimidate that NPC? Doesn't matter if you're an epic sorcerer with flames around your head, if you don't have Strength it won't work. Debris falling on your head? Again, solve it with brute force, you cannot use your magic to stop the debris mid-air. The point is: in many situations physical and mental power should not be different. So the one-stat-approach has this advantage. 2. The DnD system is uneven because of one single thing: warriors can not cast spells. No matter how useful intelligence is made for them (additional skill points etc.), wizards will always benefit more. At the same time, wizards can technically become good at fighting, so Strength IS useful to them. So maybe DnD has the wrong idea when it tied magic to a single stat for each class. It's easy to conceive a system where Strength is just as important to spellcasting as Intelligence - magic IS a mental ability, but it LEAVES through your body, so controlling its flow could well require body strength. 3. Many fantasy settings already do this, especially Eastern stuff like Avatar or Dragonball, where the holistic philpsophy is very present. My point is, we're still thinking too much in DnD terms. Tying an ability to a stat was a PROBLEM that DnD had. Combining it with another fundamental stat can solve that problem, just as tying the ability to more than one stat could. Imagine this: STR determines the focus of a spell. (Low STR - chance to split the beam and hit your team members) DEX - chance to hit. CON - Mana/Stamina depletion. WIS - defense against magic INT - strength of the spell CHA - amount of spell slots This is just a rough idea but if no stat is a dump stat for wizards/sorcerers, it's almost impossible to turn them into dump stats for other classes. You could totally overpowee INT now by tying it to talents and skills, so that warriors gain a lot by taking it - since spellcasters don't rely on it so much anymore. EDIT: Sorry for all the edits, my phone is horrible. @JFSOCC: That's irrelevant to the point (theyre still Eastern in spirit) and it's not true for Dragonball, whixh is a Japanese manga.

I just hope I'll be able to auto-adjust the rate of monthly executions to the birth rate, so that I don't suddenly wind up with no income. (Also, will heads on spikes along my walls count as a security system?)

That's not "after you do the first upgrade" but as soon as you gain the stronghold. So the populace is already in place. If you have issues as to why the populace is already there, take it up with Tim, not me. I'm calling it now: You'll lead them there. Just like Moses led the Israelites into the Holy Land. You'll not only be their lord, you'll be their holy savior as well. The event in the beginning of the game is the complete destruction of their hometown. (Obsidian have learned from their time with Bethesda that one town always needs to burn.) Just saying, it's a possibility that's still out there.

I like the oil painting style from the concept art so far and also from that Justin Sweet guy, but I wonder if it will fit the style of the game. You can say about Planescape Torment's portraits whatever you like, but at least they really fit the style of the rest of the game. I never thought BG2 had very fitting portraits and never liked their shininess and all the over-the-top details (like shiny earrings, scars, tattoos etc.) added to the faces which left no room for imagination. And, well... I don't like the IWD2 portraits too much, either. But that's mostly because they are much too dark (you can barely make out anything) and there isn't enough face in them. I want a portrait that mostly shows my character's head because that's what I identify with... and because his clothing will likely change during the game. Maybe a style just between BG1 and the current concept art would be good. Strong contrasts and relatively clear lines, but also a hint of oil painting and generally left simple so that there's enough room for imagination. (Also, an empty face is easier to photoshop than one filled with rings and scars and goggles.) Also, definitely supporting the idea of letting the community create variants of the existing portraits for loss of health or paralysis and stuff like that. As long as the devs provide some code to make it possible, the community will take care of the rest.

Oh for the love of... yes of course you can do it, I was trying to say that it would create problems somewhere else. My point was that you can not take the alpha layer away, then have your 10:1 compression as if the data in the alpha layer suddenly disappeared. Like you said yourself you'd have to use 2:1 compression on the alpha layer, increasing the size of the compressed image. That's exactly what I said - you said 10:1 is possible, I said "ah, but there's an alpha channel that might cause problems". Anyway, I have no interest in having this discussion with someone who, instead of saying "actually it works like this", prefers saying "apparently you have no idea what you're talking about, and I'm not gonna tell you". I wasn't trying to take your 10:1 compression away, just saying I was skeptical about it.

Great, nobody listened to me when I said "let's not start that again". I take it that this is your main problem with objective XP. How I see it: If there's stuff to do when you stray from the direct path in any RPG, you do it because it's interesting in and of itself, or because you get rewarded for it. In the best case, it's both. If Project Eternity didn't reward you for doing things off the direct path and they were not interesting at all, then I'd agree with your concern. But if they're interesting and I get rewarded in some way, then I don't see why I wouldn't do them. And they will reward me in some way - with a pile of gold, or with a legendary item, or with XP. There's no reason that there can't be small objectives that award you XP if you complete them. In your story about DDO, you said there were small objectives and stuff, but people rushed past that. To which I reply... well first of all, it's an MMO, where I think the mentality is a bit different. Second, apparently the small XP and item rewards were too meaningless, which can be changed by making them better. So I don't really see this as an argument against objective XP, just as an argument for having a good balance between challenge and reward. (And by the way, yes I enjoyed the New Vegas XP system as well. Wouldn't say it's perfect but it's definitely one of the best systems featuring combat XP.)

This shouldn't be a problem when you're designing the game. If you've got data that couldn't endure JPEG compression, pull it out to it's own file and stick it through lossless compression. That said, a lot of the non-art render data should be perfectly amenable to lossy compression. Are we looking at the same link? The suspension bridge has the hardest lines, and I don't see any artifacts appear until Q = 70, and that's a 300kb JPEG compared to a 4.5Mb bitmap. e: Actually we know it's acceptable because the IWD image posted on the first page is a ~30Mb bitmap, but appeared on the game disk as a 4Mb JPEG. Texture compression is a different beast to photograph (which is for our intents and purposes what PE's backgrounds are) compression. Textures are much smaller for one, but the big difference is that you need random, fast access to any point in the image. I'm suspicious of a 23% reduction though. Any old texture compression alg should be able to get 2:1 at least. Are you comparing the compressed textures to losslessly compressed ones? Or ones that have simply been resaved in a lossless format? 1. No you can't. You can't pull out the alpha layer of an image. It stores just as much information as the actual image does and you can't take it away that easily. An image is nothing but data, if you do not compress that data then the overall size will be even bigger. 2. The bridge does not have "the hardest lines". If you paint a red circle on white background and save that with 60% JPG compression, you'll know what I'm talking about. Ugly, easily visible artifacts will appear even at comparatively lossless compressions. 3. Textures are a different beast, yes - you need a lot more of them in one single screen. So they need to be optimized even more, because otherwise your VRAM just won't be able to handle it. Which isn't a problem for Project Eternity. 4. 23% the size of the original image. Not 23% reduction. I'm talking about a 100:23 compression here, not 100:77. These are things I know because I know a little bit about this stuff. For example I know that any compression is basically a Fourier transformation where the higher frequencies are cut off, resulting in a loss of detail especially when it comes to hard edges. I also know that because of this, an image that uses a very small palette of colors (like the backgrounds from Icewind Dale, which are mostly dark or white and blue) will be much easier to compress than one that uses the full range of 24 bit of available colors. What I do not know is: How the technology has advanced since 2006 and what kind of compression Project Eternity will use. Also whether there's actually any data stored in the alpha channel, whether they use normal maps, and how bad the artifacts actually are with the backgrounds they have created. All I'm saying is that a compression to 10% the size is a bit optimistic, because it is purely based on the possible compression for a simple JPEG photography with lots of smooth edges. And because I've never seen a game use JPEGs as textures and I'm pretty sure there's a good reason for it.

Yeah but if you go down that road, then you wind up at the learning-by-doing system of The Elder Scrolls, not at combat XP that can also be used to advance your diplomacy or crafting skills. I think the XP system in RPGs is too abstract for these kind of arguments. All it's saying is "during your adventure, you've grown as a person", and the actual transformation into a tangible "character growth currency" in the game can be linked to anything you want. The difference here is that one system allows several non-combat paths to victory, whereas the other system only allows combat paths. But I think this discussion has been had before. If that's the concern of some people, it's certainly allowed to voice that opinion.

Two concerns: 1. The uncompressed files might have to contain multiple layers of information. For example, the alpha channel of (some of) the image files might be used to store information about the shininess of the surface. In that case you cannot achieve the same level of compression. 2. The pictures in the link already are very blurry. And it is not actually the gradients that cause problems, but the hard lines and edges between two colors. Especially screens that have very clear color schemes will show artifacts more easily. The textures in Oblivion are compressed to 23% of their original size at best (i.e. the ones that don't contain additional information). I don't know what's possible in the engine Obsidian is using, but I wouldn't hold my breath for 10:1 compression.

Things I'm worried about: 1) They took out Repairing. Which in my opinion is a hugely important balancing feature. 2) Crafting... I loved it in Arcanum, hated it in pretty much every other game. I hope it won't be like the system in NWN2 (where, if I remember correctly, the most important thing was that you had loads of empty flasks). 2) The weird attributes - basically I just want to know what to expect here, because I've never played an RPG that didn't have some sort of standard set of attributes. 3) The stash - as Sawyer said, the game will be balanced around the assumption that players pick up and sell all the loot they find. It sounds tedious. However, it might cancel out with a probably-broken economy.

That is... incredibly defeatist. It's a valid point, though. We don't know yet how attributes will work with classes, but there is the possibility that a certain distribution of attribute points will be the optimum for each class. And that would be boring. But for me the bigger problem is still that the majority of RPG players will want the ability to create the typical characters they've created in other games. The weak but powerful wizard, the strong but dumb warrior and so on. And if they can't do that, they'll be pissed. I'm all for trying out a new attribute system, but it has to allow me to roleplay. But nobody's saying that this will be the downfall of Project Eternity or anything like that. We just have questions, and I believe that these questions are very important. 1. Will I be able to create a Wizard who is weak but good at spellcasting? 2. Will I be able to do the opposite, namely a Wizard who is very strong and actually worse at spellcasting? 3. Or will there be a fixed difference between fighting prowess between the classes? If we leave talents/feats out of the equation, will Fighters be better at fighting than Wizards who have the same attribute and skill points because they're fighters? 4. Will my class change what the attributes do in some way? Does it turn the "Strength" attribute of the Fighter into a "Magical aptitude" attribute for the Wizard (both of them simply named "Power", but with different functions)? 5. If I had a good distribution of attribute points in my first playthrough as a Fighter, will that be still a good choice for my next playthrough as a Wizard? Will I have to change anything at all in order to play my new role effectively? This whole discussion would be over if a developer said "Yes, yes, no, no, no" to these. Personally I'd love a new attribute system, I just want to be sure that I can use it for roleplaying purposes in the same way that I could before.

The problem might be your looking for someone to exactly fit the template of "cool adventurer dude" which seems really broad No, you misunderstand me. I could create my character in any of the mentioned classes in a way, but the class always seems to overrule my own idea of what kind of character he is. I want him to be a swashbuckler - but the class says he's a bard, or a fighter. The class dictates how I should think of this character, and I don't like that. So I was talking about the names in this case. My general problem with classes is, of course, that I want to create a specific character and mostly feel punished when I deviate from the archetype I'm supposed to play.

Coming from a GURPS, Fallout, The Elder Scrolls and Arcanum background mostly and having been introduced to D&D much later, I don't like classes much. I don't see the point and my opinion is that if your system only works in a specific setting, then it's usually not a very good system. What's more, I feel very limited just by the name of a class. If I want to play a swashbuckler, which class do I choose? Fighter? Yeah he's supposed to fight, but... he's not supposed to be a soldier type. Ranger? Well no, the skills fit but I don't want to be a hippie. Rogue? I don't want to rob people or backstab them, I just want to be a cool adventurer dude! Bard? Oh come on, I don't want to be a singing hippie. I think this difference in perspective is quite interesting. Not having been introduced to this type of system first, I feel kind of lost when choosing a class. I have a character in my head and have to force that into a certain class that represents a completely different archetype. Just something for you D&D players to think about. So my natural response to allowing more roles for each class is "hell yeah!". I want classes to be defined by a minimum set of abilities. Fighter: "is trained in many weapons". Rogue: "is light on his feet". Wizard: "can cast spells". Druid: "can cast nature spells". The question is, what is the difference between classes in PE? We know that each class has a certain ability, like fighters being able to force enemies to fight them and monks being able to build up wounds. But will there be more abilities that are unique to certain classes? Will the fighter be the only class with access to the "Coup de Grace" feat, for example? Or will I be able to choose the same feats and talents with my monk, slowly turning him into a sort-of fighter? Oh well. Like I said, I come from a GURPS background. My opinion is that if a class is defined by the talent tree you get, then the better system would be to open up these talent trees for all classes. The core differences of the classes could be the first "talent" from that talent tree - so that the Wizard tree gives you "Ability: Use Grimoires for Spellcasting" at the first node. And instead of saying "At level 3 you get a new class ability" you could say "when reaching tier 3 of a certain class tree, you get a new class ability". But I realize that this approach is not very popular among fans of the old IE games.