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With rim-fire guns there is the risk of having the firing pin strick the breech face at the edge of the chamber and peen it. This can be bad enough to keep a cartridge from seating into the chamber properly and it will have to be swaged out by a gunsmith. Some guns, like Ruger make the gun in such a way that it's impossible for the firing pin to do this. You can dry-fire them all day.
Older center-fire guns couldn't be dry fired because the inertial forces acting on the pin suddenly coming to a top without hitting anything would slowly stretch and finally snap the pin. With modern metalurgy this is supposedly not a problem, but with tapered pins, you still run the risk of slowly enlarging the firing pin hole and causing problems there.
Snap caps are a cheap way to be safe no matter what.
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