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<Edited in order to correct some grammar.>
Just like several people who have posted here, I don't care about a lot of game numbers by themselves. But I do think that there is a burden - again, as was pointed out - to present the world in a useful fashion in the absence of numbers. Moreover, I think that this removes something significant from a player's knowledge. After all, the reason mathematics is useful in the real world is because the real world has mathematic underpinnings.
If I pick up a baseball, I may not know that if I exert X newtons of force directly upward, it will ascend Y meters, but I have an *instinctive* knowledge that if I throw it with this much force, I can make it go that high. Likewise, a game I sometimes play when walking around involves judging when I will pass somebody based on our respective velocities. I'm not always exactly right, but - like all people, I think - I have an intuitive understanding of how things interact because I have prior experience.
So I think my twenty-five year old character ought to have a similar ability. This is a person who has, depending on his history, seen many different things. He can't say that a longsword does 3 more damage per hit than a dagger, but he *can* say that a longsword, in most cases, will be more dangerous than a dagger - and considerably more dangerous than bare fists. The problem is chiefly one of language, which was brought up earlier.
When I say that the sword is "considerably" more dangerous than bare fists, exactly what does that mean? To what specific degree? The sword is probably also "considerably" more dangerous than a oak club, but I would venture that the oak club is more dangerous than bare fists, too. In the real world I can't see numerical values, but I don't have to rely on linguistic aptitude, either. If I, as the player, know quantitatively that a longsword does base X damage, a club base X-1, and fists base X-3, my character can portray that qualitatively in a far more effective fashion than if I am simply told "sword: excellent damage, club: good damage, fists: poor damage."
To accurately portray something that is, I think, largely intuitive, is at best difficult, and at worst, linguistically cumbersome. It seems far simpler to reveal the numbers pertaining to such matters than to fall back onto, as Atyreus mentions, the standard of disguising them. As a result, when my character says that his sword is more deadly than his fists, it is an IC inability to assign specific values (just as I could not, in real life, tell someone that the my claymore does 20 damage) rather than an OOC ignorance of the game world.
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