Wouldn't it be possible to replace the innate spells impossible to show within the game with similar ones? Like gust of wind for air, burning hands or continual flame for fire, camouflage for earth and frost breath for water genasi? Obviously those are just suggestions, but I think we can easily replace the missing abilities if we allow ourselves to be creative.
Possible yes, but that's really not something we normally do. As often repeated, our goal is to recreate the D&D rulesets as faithfully as possible to the source material, within reasons of course and under the limitations of the old game engine. Particularly when it comes to classes, races, spells and feats. Yes, we have plenty of custom features and adaptations already, usually for things that were already implemented and needed balancing. I'm sure we'll implement many more variations in the future as well. That does not justify doing it for each and every instances.
We did review the possibility of adding the genasi at our last dev meeting. It was decided again not to do so. At this time, adding a race just to add a race isn't something we wish to do, especially not a restricted outcast race. The main problems remain the same, inability to script their elemental powers as per source material and the lack of suitable phenotypes. Just humans with different skin/hair colors isn't deemed sufficient. If the water sweating, fiery hairs, patches of rocks and what not could be visually implemented we'd be having a much different discussion now. But as it stands genasi is a race that both cannot be represented correctly visually and for which the main abilities can't be scripted. It is also felt they do not add anything of significance to a gothic horror atmosphere. Look no further as to why they were denied again.
Without their elemental powers genasi offer nothing to the server that other races don't already offer. That's what I meant by being at the core of their identity. Genasi do not form a cultural group of their own. They are either integrated or kept at bay of the prevalent culture from the place they are from, and those cultural outlook will vary greatly from one to another.
Of their powers, control flame is a much more potent ability in p&p than you give it credit for. Though it may be limited to torches and campfires at first, it goes up to the ability to quell or increase fire encompassing very large buildings. Something we can't reproduce. We have plenty of other easy and mundane means to lit campfires. Having that as a race feature would be redundant and lackluster. Levitating and flight are not mechanically supported aside as a visual effect for certain creature models. A race power cannot be something dependant on a DMs presence. There's too few of them around and they cannot be expected to be available 100% of the time you'd need to invoke that power. I would btw totally agree on substituting levitate for gust of wind in my own p&p campaigns, but that runs contrary to our goals for the server. Pass without trace, involves being able not to leave tracks and scent, and not to be scryed upon. Pretty much the default state for all characters already as neither of these 3 parts are features on the server. Creating water is the one feature that can easily be scripted, but that would be of too limited use on our server.
