Rate the accuracy of the following statement for games you have participated in (whether as player or DM/GM/etc.):
"If the players thought they could get away with it, they would cheat and/or exploit the rules."
Should you have participated in many games, consider it a sort of average across all the games you've played/run: in general, which rating would describe the groups you'd been in?
If you simply cannot choose just one answer, I've allowed up to 3, for example if you find that the answer is totally game and/or group dependent (e.g. players are more willing to do these things in D&D but less willing to do them in 13th Age, or whatever.)
This is bad question and a classic ENworld terrible mismatch between title question, poll question, and what's actually being asked. Try to do better, frankly.
The title is completely general.
The poll is completely general.
We only learn your actual intent, actual question in the text, but which time like 50-80% of the people voting, will already have voted, and many will have moved on. So you've carefully ensured any results you gather will be worthless.
To ENworld in general - stop doing this. Never post a poll where you can't ask the question in a title, or if you do, make sure to post something about "carefully reading the post before voting". To the people who do do that - good, you're doing it right. But more than any other forum I've ever participated in, ENworld posters love to totally make a pig's ear of this.
Generally speaking, when you take a large group of people and give them a label, like "players", and then assume a negative characteristic about them, like cheating, you need to rethink your approach. Even if you just ask whether the group is something negative.
Definitely.
Talking about my own groups, I've never really come across players who would cheat in any meaningful sense of the word,
in TTRPGs. Boardgames, wargames, videogames? I've met plenty of cheaters in those, including IRL (notably the worst cheaters I've ever encountered were all adults when I was a child with boardgames - oh and one kid in chess club at school who was just constantly and incompetently trying to cheat in ways that didn't even help him, I have no idea what his deal was). The closest I've seen to intentional cheating in a TTRPG, and it's obviously not because we all see it and laugh, is if a die goes off the table and under a dresser or something, and someone pulls it out and the result is bad, and they're like "Don't count", or it goes into a crack between planks on the table and yeah it's mostly a 1 but you re-roll it because it went into a crack. I've seen DMs so bad or pushy/tyrannical that I'd suggest that any fair hearing would say they were cheats, but their own minds, they definitely weren't cheating, they just had a conception of the game where their words were law, no matter how bad they misunderstood the rules, no matter how dumb or selfish the ruling (none of them lasted long as DMs).
Exploiting is similarly questionable, because what is the definition of an exploit? Is it legal-but-annoying min-maxining? Is it using a rule in a questionable way (in which case a lot of DMs are exploiters)? Is it using a rule in a way that it explicitly wasn't intended? If so why is the DM allowing it? It's a meaningless term without a ton more context.