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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Shaker" data-source="post: 4811770" data-attributes="member: 83801">So as part of the campaign I'm writing, one of the characters is picking up a pair of magical rapiers - I want them to be cool, since they tie into his story very tightly, but not overpowered. Here's the basic design I'm trying, and I'd like other DM's opinions on what may be too much. In essence, I do want him to prefer these over anything else he'd find (and he would anyway due to story concerns) but I don't want them to completely overpower the campaign.  I'm dropping them in as lvl 5 magic items, basically at the 'final' level of their respective plus, so he won't be able to upgrade them to +2 till he has access to lvl 10 magic items. So the idea is that there's a pair of these swords, and they house the souls of two powerful wolves - the two wolves are somewhat competitive, so they tend to balance eachother out.  Base stats are +1 rapiers with no properties/powers. When he lands a killing blow with an attack, the rapier in his main hand 'empowers', going to +2 with no properties, and the other one (losing the 'competition') goes to +0. They can further empower/diminish one more rank, giving him a +3 and a -1 (-1 to attack, -1 to damage, 0d6 on crit). He can swap which sword is in which hand in order to balance them back out if he so chooses.   After an extended rest, the swords reset to the balanced state. When a sword is at its maximum or minimum level, it gains a property - this is where the balance seems to get tricky. The ideas I had so far were: First sword (Lone Wolf theme, based on mobility) max level property (when the sword is fully empowered) - Gain access to Wolf Spirit Walk power: Free Action - At willCan only be used once per turn, can only be used on player's turnMove 2 squares - this movement ignores difficult terrain Minimum level property (when the OTHER sword is fully empowered): -1 to base movement speed Second sword (Leader of the Pack theme - based on group combat) max level property, when the sword is fully empowered - Gain access to Dogpile power:Free Action - EncounterTrigger: Your attack bloodies an enemyEffect: All of your allies adjacent to that enemy can make a MBA as an opportunity action. Minimum level property (when the other sword is fully empowered): Player grants enemies +3 to attack rolls with combat advantage instead of +2.  So the things I'm not sure about are generally the properties - are the positives too good? Should the "Dogpile" power be a daily instead of an encounter - should the MBA be an interrupt action so it has some cost to the players using it? And I had a very hard time coming up with a 'negative' property for the Leader of the Pack sword - I wanted something that wasn't just "you get -1 to hit" or "-1 to damage", so if anyone has cool ideas there, I'm very interested in hearing it.</blockquote>

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