Anything more than none...

A seasonal (or perhaps year-round) forum debate has started up out there on the Internets about hit points, damage, hits and misses, and I'm going to tell you about the Dramatic Hit Point (which really has more to do with damage).

But the keyword is dramatic. Not simulationism. Not complex. Not even abstract (although it's pretty close). This is about hit points in relation to story telling, and there's a very important separation of system and narrative that needs to be established first: hit or miss is a mechanical word used to inform players/the DM whether or not damage was applied to hit points. A giant, 20 ft high, perhaps 10ft wide, is wearing full plate, and it subject to a Hold spell. The fighter attacks this living barn, and misses the broadside. That's just lame from a narrative perspective. What really (should have) happened? The fighter's sword clinks against the giant's armor, causing no damage.

In a reverse situation, a really nasty weapon or spell is used against a character; it should kill a common person, but the adventurer survives. Clearly it's a grazing wound, or it was just "too close for comfort," or maybe the enemy is taking their time, torturing the player's character instead of making full-on lethal blows. The distance and damage scales to plot. A mechanical hit might be a narrative miss. (And in the previous paragraph, a mechanical miss was a narrative hit.) There is no absoulte, "it must always be handled such-and-such a way." The narrative can be flexible; the mechanics, obviously, are only as flexible as the DM.

I found this post over on the Wizard of the Coast forum, and I quite like the take. It even calls hit points a dramatic device! <3
I've edited some of the choice sections to post here; these quotes were original written by Iorwerth, but they have been edited.
When talking about heroes what is really being talked about is the fact that the characters are the leads in the story being told. As in all good stories, a lead character does not die without having some dramatic incident. In D&D, hit points are the mechanic that makes sure this happens when the time comes. The lower a character's hit points, the nearer they come to death/defeat and, in story terms, the closer they come to that story-point where their death/defeat has dramatic impact.

When a character loses hit points it does not mean that they have a wound of a certain type, or that they have suffered no wound and are just suffering fatigue. Instead, it is a mixture of the two. It is the numerical description of how near, in story terms, the character is to death/defeat. In a novel this would be accomplished by the writer describing the situation. In RPG terms there is no "writer," so hit points are used to cue the players in the writer's place.

A wound, no matter how it is described, is only dramaticially crucial if it is the one that causes the character's death/defeat. There's no getting around that description, but the final blow is only successfully because the lead character has been weakend by previous events, whether by wounds, by exhaustion or by being distracted by something at a crucial point.

Ah! It's almost 11:59. Mmgh, deadlines.