I don't think anyone has a major issue with hit points outside of damage on a miss.
I don't think this is true. I haven't counted the number of times the wish for a "wound system" has been wished for on various fora, but there are certainly lots of such posts (even if what is envisaged is often some sort of bastardised hit points affair rather than a complete break).
Hit points, when it comes down to it, are just an adaptation of our prediliction to count up points when playing games. For any simulation of reality they are hopeless, whatever form they come in. Their ubiquity is essentially a result of failure of imagination on our part; we simply fail to imagine other ways of doing things better suited to what we actually want to do.
Not that there aren't systems available that actually do away with them, but they are few and far between. Primetime Adventures is one exception, HârnMaster another. FATE, for all its other departures, still uses a variant on the "health track" (which is hit points with makeup on, since there is still a fixed pool of "life" to be attenuated before character death).
So, for D&D there may be little dissention about hit points, but that is because they either support the style of play implied/assumed by D&D well or they are used by those who, despite wanting a different style, can't or don't wish to envision any alternative system to the "store of life that runs out" that hit points represents.
I don't think anyone has a major issue with "hit and miss" outside of damage on a miss.
Again I remember the debates about poison taking effect and disease transmission, et al. If you don't think it has been contentious I can only imagine you weren't paying attention to those threads (which may have been a wise move, incidentally, but whatever...)
I don't think any playstyle is at issue with either hit points, or "hit or miss", in themselves.
This I find, um, incomprehensible, frankly. Hit points are one (of several) things at the very heart of what makes a system support specific play styles comfortably. They represent the stakes in play at a character level. The idea that you have a pool of "stuff" that you don't particularly lose anything for getting ablated but that you lose a "life" for getting reduced to zero (or whatever other threshold limit) is central to the specific play experience of D&D-type games. There are alternatives. 13th Age introduces one (on top of its core "hit point" base) with the "campaign loss" rule. HârnMaster of course has degree of risk (rather than degree of resource pool loss) as the main stake in combat or other dangerous pursuits. PTA has success or failure in addressing your character's "issue".
This mechanism for character survival stakes (the "life pool" of hit points) is one of a few that define the basic D&D "play style" amid the vast range of styles theoretically possible in RPGs in general. Others include:
- Character "development". In the D&D paradigm this means "the character getting more powerful". Other "narrativist" style games have the character change in ways that make them no more powerful, but might make them deeper and more complex from a story point of view. A pure sim game might arguably have no such explicit change mechanism at all; early Traveller did just that.
- Scenario assumptions. D&D rules are written assuming that the characters will be involved in a series of "adventures" that will involve doing dangerous and exciting things as a group of broadly allied characters to complete either GM assigned or player selected "missions". For sure, you
could play a bunch of ordinary villagers surviving from day-to-day and exploring their interrelationships - but then you would hardly be using any of the actual rules of D&D to do so. The assumption is a set of ne'er-do-wells chasing fame and fortune. This is reflected in the character "classes", the equipment list and the types of activity for which rules are provided, among other things.
- Character teams. Characters are defined by their role in an adventuring "team" because of the class they choose. Sure, there have been extensive attempts to fudge this by allowing "multi-classing", but fundamentally this has always been somewhat clunky as a mechanism. If you want characters to be nuanced individuals rather than "roles", why have classes at all? Many systems don't.
I should close by saying that
none of this is intended as any sort of "dig" against D&D. I think D&D is strengthened by being something specific and having a clear "personality" as a roleplaying system. When I play D&D I relish just these aspects of the play experience; this is helped by the fact that, if I want some other play experience, I choose a different system! It's true that I avoided D&D for several years after becoming frustrated with how poor it was at supporting the styles I wanted to play at the time, but having found systems that support those other styles well I later came back to D&D and found I was able to appreciate it anew for what it did well, rather than trying to make it do what it didn't do well. I commend this route to all.
