Damage
Recognise this? Yeah, it’s an energy card from the Pokémon CCG.
I mention that because there are similar symbols used in my game — you’ll see things like that red ball with a stylised fire image on it. They don’t mean the same thing, of course, since I’m not making a Pokémon CCG (though maybe I should — I hear there’s money in that!); when you see them in my video game, you’re probably looking at a weapon, a piece of armour, or a combat skill. They mean fundamentally the same thing in different contexts, but we’ll go into a bit more detail about exactly what that is. For the purposes of this discussion, we’ll assume that there are two types of symbol: the red fireball symbol (which represents fire) and the grey sword symbol (which represents "normal," or "physical," or "BONK," or whatever the fuck name I settle on). Furthermore, I’ve made crap images (
and 
) to represent them.
Now, say you have a weapon. We’ll be totally bland and formulaic and call it "Longsword," to indicate that this is your most basic of swords. This weapon may have a line on it that reads to the effect of "Damage: ." What that means, in a nutshell, is that a hit from this weapon does two points of normal-type damage to the target. A more interesting, but still entirely formulaic, weapon, say, a Flametongue Sword, might have the following line instead: "Damage: ," thereby indicating that it does two normal and three fire damage on hit. Why use dots instead of a line like "Normal: 2 Fire: 3?" It’s more intuitively understandable. The length of the dot row tells you how powerful the weapon is in general terms, and it’s easy to compare the widths of different sections of dots to tell which type of damage the weapon is stronger in (I bet you knew the Flametongue did more fire than normal damage before you even counted dots, for example). This metaphor can break down if the numbers inflate, but I’m intending to keep them low.
Armour, as I say, uses the dots as well, but in its case they represent the damage that piece of armour will negate. If you have, say, leather armour, and it has "Blocks: ," then you’ll only take one point of damage from that Longsword, and four from the Flametongue. If you have some type of chain mail that has "Blocks: ," though, you’ll take no damage at all from the Longsword. You will take three damage from the Flametongue, however, not the two you might expect at first — the chain mail blocks only the normal-type damage, and can’t block the fire-type at all.
That’s pretty much the gist of it. All offensive and defensive items and abilities have a set of dots on them representing the damage they do; the total damage is a simple matter of subtracting the defensive dots from the offensive dots.
