Yes, I think so. It's only one security guy who has made it his personal quest to keep telling us "for future reference" that we shouldn't bring in
scabbards (because you might hit a kid in the face). And then I had security called on me once, but the security guys were very polite and were unconcerned once they looked at it. The rest of the time, no one cares.
As for MD being the only one that seems to disallow real swords altogether, it's a strange combination of things. They still have sword vendors on site, so it seems a bit hypocritical to me. However, the faire is owned by a family of lawyers, in a predominantly left-leaning state that is afraid of weapons in general. MDRF is also the one we see the most
stupid drunks at. And I'm not sure of the accuracy of the stories floating around, but supposedly many years ago, they had a situation where an armed patron pulled a dagger on the queen, plus some cases of drunks swinging sharps at each other in the parking lot.
They used to only disallow patrons from carrying, but it was OK for vendors. Then some vendor did something stupid with pulling a weapon on another employee, and then that ended. Now only cast can carry.
When I was a teen, I used to sneak a sword in with me (back then I only attended once a year, so it wasn't a big organized effort). It's easy to get past security with cloaks and the like. I gave that up a long time ago, when I became more intent on honorably obeying the rules.
However, we do still from time to time see people get in with sharps, without security stopping them. We've seen a few folks brag to us about that (so they obviously knew it was against the rules).
Knowing this faire, we'll eventually get banned from bringing the fakes in, because technically their rules already don't allow for it (website says no costume weapons), and eventually they'll probably decide they can't trust their security guys to tell the difference, so they'll ban them all. But until that happens... until they explicitly say "no" to me, I think it's a valuable costume piece that completes the look, and I really haven't been hassled that much.
