I would like to have the terms and conditions show on certain event (or only certain categories would do). However it appears to be a global setting. The reason I ask is that it only applies to "events" that we have, and not "dues" that we may collect. Am I better off using conditional fields on the events I want T's and C's on and not use the global T's and C's?
You can set the text of your terms and conditions per event... but having the terms feature on is a global setting. Either use a custom field in place of the built-in terms feature, or you can just put a simple message in the terms for events that don't need it.