Quote from: rawma;1066029I'm not sure you can define rules light just by the length of the rules; a lot of lengthy rulebooks don't contain overly complicated games, and there are a few fairly short games that I wouldn't call rules light (although they often are that short only because they implicitly bring in all the traditional RPG conventions).

I think a good indicator might be how frequently rules questions can be resolved without major forays into the rulebooks; but there are probably GURPS experts who can do this for most questions.

Agree. Not saying HERO is rules light, but the game has grown from 80 pages in 1st ed Champions, to 700+ in 6th ed HERO. The page count has grown tremendously, but the actual game mechanics have not grown terribly in complexity, certainly not 10x.

Phoenix Command is definitely not rules light, but if you ignore the pages and pages of weapon data, it actually has a fairly low page count.

I think what throws people off from having a good sense of calibration on what constitutes rules light, medium, heavy, etc., is limited exposure to different games. There are lots of people in this hobby who only play Dungeons & Dragons and so come away with a warped perspective of how many rules there should be in a roleplaying game. D&D, in most editions, is actually a lot heavier than most systems. But player perspective is warped because it's familiar. Whatever you've played most is normal and therefore, no matter what it is, medium in rules heaviness.

However, just to be persnickety:

Rules-lite games are things like Wushu, Fudge, the aforementioned Honey Heist - games that generally hinge on a central mechanic, have fewer pages, or demand limited memorisation from players and GMs.

Rules heavy games are your Champions and your Hero, some editions of GURPS, etc - games that look and read like text books and require a night course and graded essay to understand.

Rules medium games are everything in-between. You can decide on the gradient yourself, because there lies the realm of internet arguments.

//Panjumanju

Dice Rolls to Attack, Defend, Use a Skill, Use an Item, Save vs Condition, Save vs Death, etc. must be part of the game's mechanics for me to be interested.

That Can be Simple, but it doesn't always end up being simple in every rule set.

Well, there's rules-easy and then there's rules-light.  

There's games that are easy to grasp and play. Most OSR games are like this, which is why sometimes people consider them "rules light". Because they don't have the later added complexity you saw in 3e, to say nothing of non-D&D games with complex systems.

Then there's games that have very light rules, stuff like Amber/Lords of Olympus, or Over the Edge.