Even healing surges may have been much better accepted had they been presented differently. The very name "healing surge" admits that hit points are all about injury, and healing surges heal them back. You can't have healing absent injury, can you?
It's a term that they then define. Certainly there's connatations to the word, but I would think everyone could accept how the word/concept is being used in the context of the game. I don't play Blackjack and expect the dealer to physically punch me when I say "hit me", because I understand that in the context of the game, the term means to deal me another card, not assualt me.
We speak of all kinds of healing, not just physical. There's psychological healing, emotional healing, even spiritual healing. We don't all immediately balk at these alternate forms of healing in general, so why is it some do when it comes to a game?
Would older edition players really be satisfied if in 4E they called hit points something like 'encounter survival points' and healing as 'restoration' and damage as 'encounter shorterning points' or what-have-you? Are people really that ingrained into the words that they can't extrapolate that something like a hit doesn't necessarily mean the opponent insta-dies? You can 'hit' a dart board for 1 point, or hit the bullseye. Both are still hits.
Now you are right that D&D doesn't model the effect of wounds well (aside from just having lower HP) but it does share the consistency of physicial damage you see in a lot of these movies. Somone doesn't get cut across the chest and then have no cut inthe next scene (and if that does happen people point and laugh because it is a consistency error---usually a bad edit). If someone cuts me with a sword I take ten points of damage, i find it hard to believe that that damage can be healed becauee I dug deep or my warlord shouted in my ear. If it was temporary HP at least the digging deep might make sense ( because digging deep doesn't restore you it just allows you to temporarily ignore the effects of being hurt).
Yes, and often by the next scene, the cut aross the chest is all but ignored. The action hero certainly didn't have a cleric with them or drink a potion, so why is the wound suddenly a non-issue? Because the hero has recovered enough from the wound to make it so (i.e., mundane healing).
Even if you take HP to be all, or virutally all, physical damage capacity, there had to be a part in you that was changing how that damage was implemented. If HP is all meat, then we can form a basis of just how damaging a weapon is against a character by comparing a hit to their start HP. A long sword averages 5 damage, you have 8 HP, so you take a heavy blow to the side nearly crippling you.
But as soon as we start levelling up the character, why doesn't the near-crippling sword hit at first level not do the same relative amount of damage at level 10 or 20? Most usually say that the character is more experienced, able to avoid the blow better now. But now we've suddenly introduced intangibles to the concept of HP.
The only way you could play HP as purely physical is to never change them from 1st level (or increment in extremely small amounts). Either that, or your heroes bulk up immensely every level.
I'm a fan of healing surges, I think they help emulate the dynamic heroic charactes we often see in movies, able to take a hefty beating but still win through, and then pull themselves together for the next challenge. I do agree that the rest periods were poorly implemented, at least extended rests. It does break things a little when characters can bounce back and forth between being okay to nearly dead to okay to nearly dead, then sleep a night and be 100% fine. I think I would have preferred a slower surge recovery rate, though I also acknowledge that this could end up slowing down the pace of the game.
