A lot of people think that a character is unaware of hit points. (And that is the general tenor of Gygax's writing on the topic in his DMG and PHB.)
Perhaps, but the character is quite aware of having taken a few good wallops in that last fight.
I always assume that behind this conversation:
Cleric's player: "What are you at?"
Fighter's player: "27 out of 51."
In fact lies this conversation:
Aloysius: "How you feeling, buddy? I saw you get hammered a bit out there. Need some patching up?"
Lanefan: "Yeah, I took a bit of a pounding - nothing serious, I guess. But if you've got some of that healin' magic to spare and no-one else needs it, light me up."
It's also very unclear what initiative means in turn-based combat systems (3E, 4e, 5e). It doesn't mean "who is faster", because a person with higher initiative doesn't get more actions than one with lower initiative. It's a metagame device for assisting in the rationing of actions, and for flavour reasons it is linked to DEX to give a general vibe of reaction times. (But it's not really about reaction times, because having better initiative doesn't in itself help dodging, AC etc.)
Rerolled-each-round initiatives are the *only* answer here; every now and then you're going to get a good shot in, but not always right after Joe's just got his good shot in and Jane's cast her latest spell. It's not perfect, but at least it shoves the metagame a bit further into the background.
Gygax tends to write as if AD&D PCs aren't aware of XP. He strongly implies that, in the fiction, killing monsters and looting treasure isn't what is making you a better fighter or cleric or magic-user.
He wrote that, but I'm not sure I agree with him if only because he also had training rules; and how does a character know when she needs to go train up if she's not aware of gaining the potential (i.e. level-bumping) to become better at what she does. It's only hard to rationalize for the martial types, really. Clerics and Wizard-types all have structured training tiers (levels), ditto Thieves and their ilk, ditto Monks and Bards.
I don't think that any of this makes D&D a storygame. It just shows that D&D has metagame mechanics.
It certainly does. That said, when one can find a way to somehow push them into the background, I think one should.
The single biggest violator of this principle, in the typical D&D game, is the decision to go and explore this location/problem, with these people, with an expectation that success is a real prospect. In other words, the basically protagonistic orientation of the PCs in most D&D play.
This is based on information that the character doesn't have, but is hugely salient to the player - namely, that I am here, at my friend's house, playing a player character in a FRPG where the GM opposite me has prepared some sort of gameworld or scenario or whatever for the rest of us to engage with via our PCs.
Perhaps, but there's in-game character-knowledge ways around all this too.
Example: when the party start out they don't coalesce independently, someone puts (or forces) them together and orders them into a mission; and those giving the orders at least sort of know the success chances of the party. Pathfinder, of all games, almost bakes this in with the whole Pathfinder Society thing; and it's one aspect of that setting that really helps explain the existence of adventuring parties.
Lan-"relying on healin' magic since 1984"-efan