THIS is the hill you chose to take your stand on?
Sure. I'm well prepared up here on the top, and the slope is pretty steep making assaults likely to fail.
Okay, fine. PHB, pg 6. "The DM narrates the results of the adventurer's actions."
You're in the general discussion area, so you'll have to tell me which PHB you mean.
However, even if we concede, "The DM narrates the results of the adventurer's actions.", it does not follow that the particular description of "getting stabbed in the stomach" is valid, much less that "you get run through by a sword but shrug it off as a minor wound" is a valid description. In fact, even if we concede, "getting stabbed in the stomach" is a valid outcome of the adventurer's actions, it doesn't follow that it is ever valid except in the case of the PC being killed or incapacitated (that is reduced below 0 hit points). That is to say, if a PC has 50 hit points, and a sword blow does 8 damage, it does not follow that a DM correctly narrates this as, "The sword goes right through your guts.", much less that the rules actually encourage that particular narration.
This is particularly true because since the beginning of D&D, Gygax explicitly called out this very description - being run through by a sword but not actually being killed or even severely inconvenienced thereby as ridiculous and not implied by the hit point system. Indeed, he explicitly stated that DMs that engaged in such narration misunderstood what hit points were and were doing it wrong. To understand otherwise is a misunderstanding in every edition of D&D that I'm aware of. Even 4e, which has a different hit point model that other editions, carries this the other way, with hit points being less 'meat' than they had been rather than more 'meat'.
Saying that there are no hit locations means that no one can ever be stabbed on any part of their body is, in fact, incorrect.
Saying that people can be stabbed on any part of their body is not the same as saying that either the rules provide for it, or that such color occurs at any time other than when such a wound would be "fatal, or at least incapacitating." Remember, it's not merely your assertion that D&D provides for PC's to be stabbed in particular parts of their body, but that it provides for PC's to be stabbed in particular parts of their body
and also that it explicitly does not imitate the fatal or incapacitating nature of such blows. It is a total misunderstanding of how D&D has approached wounding to assert that the color of an attack is lethal or incapacitating, but the mechanics of that attack are not lethal or incapacitating! You have it precisely backwards. Attacks of a lethal or incapacitating nature have that color if and only if the mechanics suggest the attack is lethal or incapacitating. Eight hit points of damage on a PC with 60 total hit points are not (in general) properly to be narrated as, "The orc slices your head off, but you shrug off this wound and reattach your head." Generally speaking, if the color of the narration is, "The orc slices your head off.", you are barring some unique supernatural ability, very much quite dead regardless of how many hit points you have left. But you would as a GM generally not narrate the result of 8 hit points of damage as, "The orc slices your head off.", unless and until those eight points of damage in fact do kill your PC.
Or in other words, just because the DM narrates the results of the player actions, does not mean D&D combat is meant to look like or is encouraged to look like the fight between King Arthur and the Black Knight, where limbs go flying but "it's only a flesh wound".
Indeed, if limbs explicitly go flying as the mechanical result of an attack, it is in fact very incapacitating. And if your head goes flying as the explicit mechanical result of an attack, you are in fact dead, hit points remaining or not. An example of this approach is found in the 2e super-module "Axe of the Dwarven Lords". It's just that, as I said, normally D&D has no rules specifying any such mechanical result.
With the abstract meaning of HPs it's not tracked at that level, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't happen following the rules that the DM narrates the outcomes of the rolls and the PC's actions.
Again, but it does not mean it ever happens except when the blow really is mechanically lethal and incapacitating. Any "heroism" involved in D&D does not come explicitly from the ability of the hero to shrug off the blows of giants or what have you.
If you can only understand hard crunch rules, then tell me that multiple characters falling 500 feet to get up and keep fighting (avg dmg = 70 HPs) is not more heroic then real life.
I don't know what you mean by understanding only hard crunch rules, but you've once again missed the point. I admit that falling (and its counter part, submersion in acid/lava) have always been sticky points in the hit points description, but conceptually they do not have to be any different than the afore mentioned sword swings. If a character falls 500 feet, and gets up to keep fighting (because he has hit points remaining), then it is not the case that he fell straight down without breaking his fall in any fashion straight on to hard rocks without any padding. Rather, the DMing narrating this result invents appropriate heroic actions, luck, and divine providence to explain how the hero mitigated the 500 foot fall and so saved his own life and prevented the death and traumatic injuries resulting from such a fall. It does not follow that the hero is simply a brick that can survive such falls without damage. Rather he slows his fall by some mechanism and fortunately lands on something soft or yielding.
That is certainly "more heroic than real life", but not in the fashion you describe when you suggest that the player character is capable of shrugging off being stabbed through the stomach.
The controversy around the realism of falling that has been with D&D since the early days comes from the fact that the fortune of an attack is generally determined before the color. That is, we know mechanically the results of an attack before we invent a color narration to describe it. But for many DMs, falling seems to move fortune from the middle of the resolution to the end of it, and certainly does in most DMs natural approach to the scene. That is, typically we narrate that the character has fallen before we calculate the damage of the fall. In the case of narrating a 500' free fall plunge on to rocks, the amount of damage typically levied by D&D as falling damage seems radically insufficient, and to many DMs always has. That's why you will find, going back to the earliest days of D&D, various suggestions for increased falling damage to cause falling damage to behave better given the assumptions of the system. You'll also notice that Gygax frequently in his modules rules such fortune at the end scenarios to be simply instant death with no possibility of the save. That is, if the PC really free falls 500' onto rocks, or really is dumped onto lava, or really submerged in a huge vat of acid, there is no point in calculating damage at that point since the result has already been determined and is realistically lethal. There is only a point in calculating damage to see if such things actually happened.
