Except it's not genre appropriate, nor is it even rules-adjacent for a monk to create a Flash tornado.
Is it? What genre are we talking about here? I mean, there's a LOT of variability within D&D. Certainly the genre of stories that the Monk class is drawn from (Chinese Gong-Fu tales) contain stuff like that! A 4e Monk turning into a tornado? I can definitely see that! A 3.5 one? Yeah, no doubt there's some sort of crazy item or multi-class shenanigan or something that will let you have that outright as a thing. So, no, I don't think its outright genre-breaking in D&D at all! Beyond that, yeah, maybe at low levels it violates expectations of what sorts of 'powers' are in play, but I did say there could be reasons why it might not be possible. Just not ones associated with "this is too powerful."
Sure. If I were playing a high power supers game. Superman has effectively godlike powers, but I'm not playing a supers game.
Dude, would you like a gander at the character sheet of "Questioner of All Things", a sixteenth level AD&D wizard who can TRIVIALLY do "godlike things" for breakfast? Last I checked AD&D is definitely D&D!
Yet some people will push the boundaries far beyond the established parameters.
Who established the parameters? I mean, sure, its possible to have a player in a game who insists on trying to go far outside the conventions of that specific game and doesn't take the hint in terms of what kind of tone/genre is being established by the table (and presumably corresponds with one that the game supports). But this is just like saying that D&D is a bad game because you could have a DM who is arbitrary, capricious, and bullies the players. Anything is possible, and no game will entirely withstand enough malfeasance in play (or simple ineptitude perhaps).
I run campaigns up to 20th level (I did 30th in 4E). It's not a problem with PC power level. It's people trying to make an end-run around the rules in order to achieve or gain something that is outside of the shared genre concept. This can be small "I had brunch with Odin" in a campaign where the gods are distant and unreachable and it's been clearly established that travelling to most other planes (especially Valhalla) is nigh impossible for most planes and Plane Shift is unavailable. It can be bigger as in someone who wanted all the abilities of a dragon and those of a vampire without paying any penalties when everyone else is running a standard character. It's doing things that isn't even close to the agreed upon nature of the game or what the characters should be able to do.
Right, but again see above if you think that somehow makes a given type of game not EVER WORK. They work fine. Players decide how things work all the time. I do it every Wednesday (usually) in our BitD game, along with
@Campbell,
@kenada,
@niklinna, and
@Manbearcat. I mean, I literally just say, pretty often, "Takeo is doing X, Y, and Z, and such and such is coming down." Now, a lot of it will trigger some sort of mechanics, a Long Term Project, Acquire an Asset, Information Gathering, a full up Score, or maybe just some fiction being established. Since the thread is primarily about D&D, I am not going to fight with you about the EXPECTATIONS of how fiction and characters work in D&D. Sure, its not usual in most games for the players to just declare things. There isn't really a set of mechanics which handle that, and there's normally an expectation that there's some GM designed content that is supposed to be the focus.
That being said, a LOT of our high level AD&D play looked a heck of a lot like BitD! We would all just start shooting the naughty word on a Saturday afternoon sitting out at the table on my back porch and dream up something. I remember once we all decided that we wanted to find some anti-magic, and that evolved into a famous dungeon that Mike invented on the spot (mostly to screw us, lol) called "Mountain of the Beholders", not just a few beholders, THOUSANDS of the suckers! Needless to say we never were able to get what we were after, even with 5 super high level wizards. We did kill a vast number of beholders though! haha.
Put it this way. Let's say you're playing checkers. Someone decides to replace their tokens with chess pieces and use chess moves. If people want to play checkers, that's uncool. Want to play chess? Cool. Go ahead and play chess. Want to play a supers game? Awesome, write up a speedster. If you want to play a gonzo, anything goes game, awesome. Go for it. I'm not interested, but that shouldn't stop anyone. When I play D&D I want to play in the realm of D&D. There will always be things the rules don't cover, things the DM just has to rule on the spot which is a lot of the fun.
But those rulings? That on-the-spot creativity? It still needs to fit the style, theme and shared expectations of the game and the group.
Nobody is saying its cool to wreck a game. What I'm saying is, there's no such principle in RPGs as "the players cannot be in charge, they'll just wreck the game." Yet I hear some variation of that constantly in these sorts of threads.