Some people can still have fun with it. Other people come to this thread, to answer the question being asked, about why they can't enjoy it.
I think it is fair to say that after 400 some posts, we have moved beyond people simply stating their positions.
You're the one who said that nobody took 1E seriously, so why should anyone take that into consideration? If you don't care, because you aren't taking it seriously, then your opinion (on what it is that is specifically working against narrative consistency) is irrelevant. Because, as you stated, you don't care.
And that's the running theme, throughout 5E, and especially in its healing rules: It's fine if it doesn't make sense, as long you're only playing with people who don't care.
Ah, I see. You are taking the point too far.
The point is not a lack of care, as in "I could care less" the point is a matter of focus and resources.
I never said no one took 1E seriously, the very fact that the game ballooned into a worldwide phenomena with multiple worlds, at least one TV series, multiple movies (animated or otherwise) and a hefty novelization library would put such a notion immediately to rest. Obviously people took the game seriously if they were passionate enough to create so much
more
However, the focus was never on realistic simulations of a fantasy world.
The Funhouse dungeon where monsters with no ecological reason to were all crammed together, simply because it was a more interesting fight, shows us this. A game that wanted to simulate a real world with real monster habitats that naturally fall from the abilities and evolution of the monsters would not have that.
The sci-fi elements thrown in for the amusement of the players, allowing medieval knights to interact with cleaning robots from a spaceship show us this. In a game that was firmly rooted in a single genre of high fantasy, especially as it was understood from mythology, would likely not have been so blatant and such elements would have been far reduced, leaving us only the technology of the Middle part of the Middle Ages.
But, just because the game has never been focused on perfectly simulating a real, high fantasy world, does not mean no one cared, or no one brought forth these elements. In fact, often times they help make much more interesting and coherent stories. I truly enjoy figuring out how monsters fit into the world, where they would arise, how they would interact with the environment. But, this can also be a problem for me, because then the monster populations are either too small to be a proper challenge (I once ran a game where most of the gameplay took place in an Empire, and because having dangerous monsters roaming the countryside is bad for an empire, the players almost never encountered any monsters at all.) or far too numerous to ever fight through (I also ran a game where an entire island being settled was packed to the brim with various monsters, I had to stop having random encounters, since traveling for a week through the jungle would lead to multiple fights a day, and we did not have the time out of game or the resources in game to have that many fights just traveling to the plot important location)
And, I would never come to the forums and complain that DnD 5e does not properly set up and layout monster ecologies... because that isn't the focus of the game. The game is not meant to simulate a real world. It is a game.
And that is how I see HP. It is not that I do not care about HP, simply that focusing on realistic portrayals of injuries, lingering wounds, broken bones, and recovery times is not something the game is built to focus on, and the amount of work I would need to put in to change that, and the amount of additional fun it would bring to the players, it is not worth it to me to focus on it either.
IF we examine it too closely, does it seem wildly inaccurate and unrealistic for the story? Yes, of course it does, and we might or might not come up with explanations that we like for our own internal consistency. But the energy I could spend focusing on analyzing how long it should take for my character to recover from being cut by a greataxe wielded by a Frost Giant (an attack which in the real world would probably be instantly deadly no matter what due to the sheer force of the blow likely rupturing internal organs) I could instead spend figuring out more fun crafting rules, or rules for running a village, things my players want me to focus on, because they will allow them to explore new and interesting stories that wish to explore.
