Quote Originally Posted by Greywander View Post
It kind of surprises me we don't really see more of this in D&D, considering it started as a modified wargame where you control a single soldier instead of whole armies. I'd like to see a lot more stuff like this. I think it works best when it's an emergent property of the mechanics, rather than specifically giving bonuses or penalties to certain characters. For example, cavalry are typically an emergent counter to archers simply because their faster speed lets them get into melee range to butcher the archers, especially when the archers are mechanically represented as glass cannons. But often pikemen have to be given special bonuses that specifically target cavalry instead of it being emergent based on more general traits that they have.
That is relatively simple to answer :

The more your combat has rock-paper-scissors elements, the more the important action becomes about deciding combat pairings. Which means, you need really robust movement rules, you need a battelmap and most of the stuff both sides do suring combat is moving around and denying enemy movement, competing for advanatages positions.

In a wargame that works well. For a tabletop-rpg it is a significantly less good fit.

Another problem would be that if enemy groups are not internally balanced, you will always have certain PC types that are utterly useless in the encounter and others that are the star of the show. That is not ideal either.