I've been playing DM a long time, and none of the players have ever known how many hp they have. (With the possible exception of this one guy who used to code there.) Some of us can take a stab at guessing what numerical value our stats are, because we know that 300 is the highest stat value a mortal can have, but most people are too new to know that, and even those of us who know that don't care about the actual numbers.
When you come up against something you wanna kill, you really have no way of knowing how hard it is, unless you've killed similar things before, or unless it's something everybody KNOWS is hard like Guido (and the uber-hard things generally have something in their descs that would influence you not to try fighting them unless you're REALLY good). When advising a fighter about a particular opponent, the typical tactic is to say well if your skills are worse than blahblah, don't try it, or if you can't kill a such and such, don't try it. HP never comes into it at all really. And damage messages don't equate to a certain amount of hp damage, but to a certain % of the critter's hp. Maybe you just hit that landshark for the same amount you hit a mouse for earlier, but you killed the mouse whereas the landshark only gets damaged barely.
The only problem with DM and numbers is that most players know the number of improves you need to get to the next skill level. (Skill levels are expressed in words too, but people make "imp counters" and so on so it's not really as numberless as it might be.)
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