AbdulAlhazred
Legend
1e was a different beast than 5e, and the 5e definition is what I was discussing with [MENTION=6972053]Numidius[/MENTION]. Personally, if you do something in my game that gives up hit points, like deliberately stepping off of a cliff or standing still for a sword strike, the PC is going to die or at least be down and dying.
I have played 5e, and read through a good chunk of it, but I am not really intimately familiar with all of the nuances of how it describes things. The one 5e campaign I played in was run basically as a system update to a setting that was mostly developed under 2e and then 3e, and the players were basically just using 5e as a 'better 3e' from what I could see. We experimented with the 'story based' background/traits/inspiration system a little bit, but I wouldn't even be able to tell you how it envisages hit points. I would expect that the concept is pretty similar in spirit to what was prevalent in 1e, hit points are a blend of toughness, luck, skill, and 'plot armor' which is meant to express your character's 'plot significance' and thus resistance to being taken out, more than anything else. Personally I think this is the best way to envisage hit points in all 'classic' D&D editions, and 3.x as well, and really isn't all that challenged in 4e and 5e either. In 4e there's more of an explicit acknowledgement of this fact baked into the rules, but it really has always been there. This is why many, maybe most, tables in all forms of D&D will simply allocate damage to the character in all situations, because it comports with the idea of hit points as a measure of plot significance of the character.