Elemental Damage Types

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Elemental Damage Types are a long-running and proud tradition of tabletop gaming, even if some may now think they were a vidya invention. Similarly to Physical Damage Types, Elemental Damage Types let RPGs broaden the tactical aspect of combat by giving creatures unique resistances, weaknesses and immunities - a fiery creature is typically resistant to fire but vulnerable to cold, or vice versa, though breaking the paradigm can and does happen, which players can often be rather ticked off by.

In D&D

Dungeons & Dragons, of course, has long used elemental damage types, though ironically it has never managed to perfectly equate its use of them with its elementalism, instead tending to have Acid stand in for Earth, Cold for Water, and Lightning for Fire.

Acid: Corrodes and melts things.

Cold: Freezes things. In older editions, creatures killed by cold damage may freeze solid and then shatter, resulting in losing their loot.

Fire: Burns things. Hands down the most common of the elemental damage types, and thus also the one most commonly resisted, which makes it rather self-defeating - yeah, it's easy to fill out your arsenal of spells as a pyromancer, but a lot of creatures will resist or flat out ignore that damage once you start going after bigger threats than lowly bandits, goblins and orcs. This does depend somewhat on edition.

Force: Not so much an element as it is pure arcane energy, which is why you see it on plenty of Wizard spells like Magic Missile. Later on in 5.1e, nonmagical force started to replace magical physical damage on many monster statblocks.

Lightning: Zaps things.

Sonic: Pulverizes flesh and shatters bones with waves of sonic force. Introduced in 3rd edition, it was renamed to the more fantastical-sounding Thunder damage type in 4th, and this stuck around into 5th edition. Thunder and Force damage later got confusing as they also used like concussive damage, with Thunder being rarer and tied to effects specialized in destroying objects. Sonic was regarded as hands-down the single most broken elemental damage type in 3e, because as this was the first time when the damage type appeared, practically nobody remembered to make monsters resistant or immune to it, and so it was pretty much the most reliable damage type in the game. It was so OP that it actually caused the Elemental Substitution metamagic feat to get rewritten so it couldn't let you sub-out for Sonic damage and just go around booming everybody's heads apart.

Positive Energy: Draws upon the energy of life itself. Most Positive Energy effects only hurt the undead and instead heal the living, under the old "Revive Kills Zombie" trope.

Negative Energy: Draws upon the shadowy energies of death to drain away life. In a reverse to Positive Energy (they are even drawn from opposite Energy Planes), Negative Energy tends to heal the undead and harm the living.

Radiant: Disintegrates things with the elemental powers of light. Aka, holy lasers! Introduced in 4th edition as a more fantasy-appropriate alternative to Positive Energy, and stuck around into 5e.

Necrotic: Dissolves things into darkness and dust with the elemental power of nothingness. Introduced in 4th edition as a more fantasy-appropriate alternative to Negative Energy, and stuck around into 5e.

Poison: Whether or not Poison is an elemental damage type has flip-flopped over the years, but it seemed to solidify as one with 4th and 5th edition.

Psychic: Deals damage to the mind rather than the body, making it the damage of choice for psychics. Has also been referred to as Mental damage.

One of the problems with elemental damage types, if you wanna be a themed spellcaster, is that there's frankly more options for some types than others. Fire or Lightning spells are decently common, but Cold/Ice is way less so, and as for the rest...!

In 3rd edition, perhaps recognizing this, two Metamagic feats were introduced that were pretty much essentials if you were going to be an Evoker, or one of the Evoker-but-harderer classes like a Warmage: Energy Substitution, and its improved variant Energy Admixture. The former is a multi-selection metamagic feat; each time you pick it, you choose one elemental damage type (originally Acid/Cold/Electric/Fire/Sonic, but it was quickly reprinted without the last one) and when you applied the metamagic, it changed the damage type to that choice. Thus, even one pick of Energy Substitution effectively doubled your arsenal, making it a no-brainer for any blaster or sniper type magic user. Energy Admixture would double the damage types (and the damage inflicted), so it was even better.