Yeah, just my opinion really (I'm always keen to stress that) as people can of course have different opinions.
Nevertheless Gary Gygax had similar opinions to my own on this subject...here's a little snippet:
Hit points originated as an abstract representation of the ability to absorb attacks by a military unit of organization. When pulled from the wargame world to Dave Arneson's Blackmoore campaign (the origin of Dungeons & Dragons), this arbitrary measure was retained. The value made little sense - while a certain number of damage points might work to measure a ship's seaworthiness or a platoon's ability to take casualties and continue fighting, it was a poor measurement of an individual's health. After all, people don't just keep functioning unhindered while absorbing loads of damage, and then suddenly conk out once an empirical threshold is reached.
In Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, co-creator Gary Gygax tried to explain that hit points were only an abstraction. While an eight-point blow from a sword might be a lethal blow to a normal villager, for a skilled fighter (with dozens of hitpoints) this might only be a scratch - or even a lack of contact altogether, but more a representation of his stamina being "worn down" as he dodges what would have been a lethal blow. In other words, the abstraction of hit points included all kinds of other factors that would have been too tedious to model in the game.
EDIT: I guess the crux of the point I'm trying to make is that a 'badly affected' character with just 1HP can function just as well as a character with a full 100HP. We must therefore assume that the character with 1HP is just as physically capable (no missing limbs, no bashed fingers, etc) as the 100 HP character. The only difference being that the next monster is more likely to 'defeat' them. Hence I was trying to illustrate that the portraits of these two 'physically able' characters might not look any different.
I don't mind it they do of course (personal preference is a wonderful thing).
