Fanaelialae
Legend
Absurd to you maybe. Not to me. What's absurd to me is that you think that hp loss telling you the fighter was scratched is useful information. To each their own.Which means the game mechanics aren't telling us anything useful. We're wasting a lot of effort and table time on intangibles that will be rendered irrelevant after the next short rest, and any sort of lasting injury is relegated entirely to DM fiat and meaningless flavor text. The priorities for such a model are absurd.
As I see it, it's a simple system that works. They aren't rendered irrelevant after a short rest because they drain hit dice or healing surges, depending on the edition. Once you're out of those the well is empty. It's a different dynamic from AD&D, but that doesn't make it useless. If you make short rest overnight and long rests a week, then you're much closer to AD&D (although with a cleric, the AD&D party will recover significantly more quickly in most cases).
I think they are quite useful. They tell us how close each character is to being taken out of the fight. If you think that's useless, try running a D&D combat without hp. It will quickly become apparent that without hp, it is unlikely that there will be a victory to the battle. The two sides will simply clash ad infinitum.