Hey Mike
I was an ARMA member for 2 year's and still practice weekly with the local group, ARMA use's 4 tool's to train wooden waster's(similar to shanai, they were used historicly) for drill's and light sparring, blunt steel also for light sparring and drill's, sharp steel for actual cutting, and padded weapon's for full speed and full contact sparring.
There are 2 way's to approach fighting with a sword armoured and unarmoured and the technique's for armoured can be used against someone unarmoured but not the other way around, when armoured it is rare to see a cut, or slice, it is mostly halfsword work where one hand is on the hilt the other hold's the blade about half way up this is to facilitate throwing your opponent and getting the point into the joint's of the armour, a cut has little or no effect on plate armour.
The SCA is very artifical in there ruleset, When we spar in ARMA it is pretty all out we throw each other and hit pretty hard we do use the "honor" system though as to if the hit was a debilatating hit or not such as this:
this was done with a wooden waster and I am pretty sure in a real sword fight i would have lost my right hand.
this is a 3 day old bruise from a thrust to my chest
which bent a fiberglass rapier simulator about 2 inch's so i am pretty sure that would have been bad also, I know this because i have test cut and thrust with accurate replica weapon's on meat and bone to get a good idea of what it take's to go through flesh.
I am a big proponent of training as realisticly as possible, that is one problem we face in HEMA the fact that we can never realy be absolutely sure whether it would work, because it is impossible for us to get into a real sword fight we can test our unarmed though because we can grapple/wrestle in a pretty rela enviroment which my gorup does on a fairly regular basis.
that is one thing with HEMA there is a plethora of manual's both armed and unarmed, if people have an interest it is out there for us, that is one of the thing's that brought me to the DB was the realistic training and acceptance of so many diffrent art's.
Jeff