I'm running an Eberron cop game set in Sharn. The cops are 6th level. They win.
It was okay when it was just stopping petty crimes, or small groups of thugs. But then I decided to have them go up against an organization who is tough and has a lot of resources: Daask, the monstrous crime syndicate, run by an ogre mage, with gnoll, medusa, harpy, and minotaur henchmen. I came up with a series of crimes they'd commit, working toward a secret goal so that I could get this nice "investigate for a while, then finally put the pieces together and crack the case" feel.
Instead, after Daask commits one crime, the cops used locate creature (lesser dragonmark of finding) and rode around in a cab until they found a gnoll. They bumrushed the guy, took him captive, and cast suggestion on him:
"Answer all our questions fully and truthfully."
Gnoll fails his save. They find out where a few of the hide-outs of Daask are, who the next up the totem pole is, where he likes to go, and what his powers are. They also get a sense of what Daask is up to, but the gnoll only knows so much.
I'm okay at this point. Sure, they got a lot more information about the bad guys than I wanted them to have yet, but they're being creative. I'm cool with it.
Then they go to where they know the gnoll leader goes -- a place where he's vulnerable. They use disguise self to get close to him, and they catch him and his cronies by surprise, and take them prisoner. They cast suggestion on the leader, and then learn pretty much the full scoop on Daask's plans.
Now, I have no problem with the PCs winning. That's what they're supposed to do. And they still have to deal with just the raw manpower of Daask, and its leaders, who don't come out to the surface of the city, but instead stay in the tunnels below. So I've still got adventures I can run, even if I have to scrap my original ideas.
But here's the problem. The players ask me, "Why hasn't Daask already been disposed of?"
The Sharn sourcebook sets up Daask as this mobile, hard to pin down group of monster who hide around the city. But in two days, with just a couple of spells and a mere five cops, the Sharn watch has figured out pretty much all they need to know. Now they just need to get support from the military to go root out this terrorist cell.
Of course, I've got tricks up my sleeve. I'm going to have Daask attack the cops at their homes, threaten them, and try to intimidate them to give up. The PCs won't be able to get the rest of the cops on their side, because the cops aren't heroes; they aren't going to risk their lives, especially when Daask usually just terrorizes poor folks. The PCs will be on their own.
So the spells aren't bad, but they change things.
Now if the PCs had scry and teleport, they would already have scrysassinated the leaders of Daask, decapitating the organization so they're no longer a threat. At 6th level I can handle it, but 9th level would drive me nuts.
