For the sweet sweet ransom you can collect from the kind of family that could afford full plate armor.

*points to poleaxe

meant to be a reply to exy

I mostly imagine just a lot of noise and darkness with people blindly swinging sharp weapons at each other and hitting more of their friends than their enemies.

The butt isn't that great of a target; it'd usually have maille over it like all soft bits, and isn't that close to major arteries (lots of muscle mass). Groin, armpit, and eyeslot are better if you want to kill instead of capture for ransom, and there are certainly depictions of people being stabbed in those places.

Yeah, unlike the Japanese armies that are often portrayed in bright colours and such, medieval armies are portrayed as mostly consisting of browns and greys and shit. Sure it might be easy to distinguish highlanders or other regionally distinct soldiers as well as units with standardised uniforms but very often these guys would be on both sides of the battle.

Nobility would definitely be a lot easier to pick out who is on what side owing to their heraldry and rarity as well as their superior equipment but I bet they still took the opportunity to cut a rivals legs off "accidentally."

So yeah, with my limited knowledge that I mostly got from videogames, movies and wikipedia I would say a lot of friendly casualties happened in those days. Not like when it was Romans vs. barbarians like in the good old days.

Actually, Medieval Heraldry contained A LOT OF BRIGHT VIVID COLORS. Deep purples, blues, yellows, bright (practically neon) greens...

There were some fruity designs, make no mistake.

Adrenaline and shock does some weird shit, so I doubt a flesh wound would stop anyone from fighting right away. The lethal wound areas also have the tendency to be horribly painful as well, causing instant dibilitation.

Finishing off an enemy is to keep yourself from getting stabbed in the back, because I'd definitely go after the jackass that stabbed me (imagine that tendency was even higher back then when a deep flesh wound had a good chance of killing you from infection later).

That's what I said, owing to their heraldry.

You can cast spells in full plate, you just got to waste a few feats. Better to get to scale and stop there, +7 bonus with little drawback.