Chaosmancer
Legend
I'm responding honestly to the question asked by the OP. Ever since I started playing (in 2E), the game has worked a certain way, and I'm not happy about the radical departure in more recent years.
I couldn't care one whit about anything that happened prior to 2E. If you say that you never took it seriously, then good for you, but it's also irrelevant. That's not my game, I never played it, and it has absolutely zero bearing on the game I actually care about.
If everything except your own experience is irrelevant then you cannot make any claims whatsoever to change the minds of people. Because their experience is equally valid.
And, I believe it was you who said:
Rationalization is not a useful tool here. Whatever answer it leads you to, it's not useful beyond the level of a mere game. It certainly can't generate a meaningful narrative, the way a traditional RPG would, because the ultimate answer for why anything happens, will always just be that "it's a game".
It was a response to that idea where I brought up the "traditional RPG" in the old modules that are the most famous, pointing out that narrative consistency has rarely been a strong point in DnD's past. And now your response is "those modules don't matter, I am only considering my own experience from 2E on and nothing else."
Well, I don't know what houserules you've been running for the last thirty years, so I cannot speak to your experiences. I do not know what adventures you ran, so I cannot use the risk vs reward scenarios involved to talk to you. I know nothing of your expeirence, and since you will accept no evidence beyond your own expeirence, there seems to be nothing more to say to you at all.
If you want to argue about how severe a hit really is, well... you can't reconcile being beaten into unconsciousness and six seconds from bleeding out, with being good as new with zero scratches the next morning. It isn't a nebulous or amorphous state; it's an impossible and self-contradictory state.
You also can't reconcile the fact that a person who has lost 149 hp and still has 1 hp left, has suffered no detriments to their fighting ability whatsoever.
But, while the narrative might not be reflected in the mechanics, it is a far easier game to play if you don't have incremental penalties at every 10% of health lost to keep track of.
But, it still seems to be working well enough that people can play, enjoy, and make stories out of the game.