It's not so much that it's rules light but that it actually is well designed.
I'm obviously talking about 'rules light' in relation to the majority of the most popular systems that are mostly complex, not as a means of suggesting it is 'off the wall.' and diametrically opposed to so-called common sense rules of good design. For example, I think
Master of Orion 2 and
Master of Orion 1 are great and well-designed games, even if
Master of Orion 2 was crazy and trying too hard t be
Sid Meier's Civilization in SPAAAAAACEEEE while
Master of Orion 1 is a simple and elegant thing of beauty.
Also, having played
Houses of the Blooded I can say it is awesome and you should really try
In A Wicked Age too.
Bass said:
I'll give you a brief example of what I mean; most roleplaying games work like this: To hit someone you roll to hit, they roll to dodge, then if you hit, you roll damage which is a completely different set of dice and instead of trying to roll under/over, you're rolling to get as high a number as possible, then that subtracts from a total of hits. If you want to cast magic, it's a whole other system, and other powers like telepathic attacks ignore this entire ordeal. Then, if you want to do anything else, you just roll once and that's it. So you've got four or five different task resolution systems in one game. And that's without including all the fringe situational modifiers that kick in, the special rules associated with powers, stats, and skills, and on and on and on. As such, the game works like this: you roleplay, then you go to do something, everything and everyone stops, pick up the rule book, check the rules, roll and double check and so on.
This is one thing Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition has tried to get rid of: the need for entire subsystems to process different kinds of actions, with completely different means of resolving tasks.
This isn't to suggest that D&D4E is remotely close to the role-playing system you've designed for you and your friends, but rather, I understand precisely what your beef is with 88% of most task resolution systems: the need for players and DMs to have to grok different ways of computing the success or ability to succeed in certain actions, and the 'laundry listing' of lots of rules that may or may not come into play, particularly situational modifiers (+2 to hit for combat advantage, -2 to hit for being prone, -5 to enemy's defense because he is blinded, etc.)
Of course, the thing of it is that people who stop, drop and rule book for every situation are the ones who are killing the flow of their game instead of using collaborative reasoning to make a judgment call and the people who feel the need to memorize every rule are the ones who are killing themselves for insisting on system mastery to play a game, when the ultimate goal is to have fun.
Over the past decade, this subcultural quirk has been recognized by game designers and the importance of 'eyeballing difficulties' or 'off the cuff ruling' is explicitly mentioned in the books, but gamers themselves are butt hats who don't pay attention to it because they've fossilized their habits of needing to rely on RAW (rules as written) for everything, even to the point of assuming that if something is in dispute that the rules don't explicitly resolve, then it is assumed that it does not exist. (For example, there are no rules for draining the poison out of a snake bite in D&D4E, so you can't do it supposedly. Or there are no rules for computing the an NPC's friendliness or hostility, therefore there is no real social mechanic.)
While role-playing games can be needlessly complex, they can be controlled simply because they are only as needlessly complex as you allow them to be. Now the sensible solution is to go play a system with a simpler design that suits the kind of game you want to play, but sometimes the group needs to not let the rules go out of control, similar to how 'rules light' systems have, in the past, gone out of control because of abusive players and hostile GMs or even just a 'friendly competition' between both sides of the screen. Heck, those situations are what make the funniest 'What Happened At My Table' stories of 1st and 2nd edition D&D.