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I'm generally drawn to crunchy rules sets, like Pathfinder. However, when I GM I find myself running things very Old School. I tend to blow off most of the rules and just make stuff up on the spot. And as a player I often forget about stuff on my character sheet anyway. I like Pathfinder but I want a "Pathfinder Lite" version. Something which keeps that same great taste but with less bloat. Most of the threads on the message boards here seem to focus on chopping off chunks of the rules so slim them down but those approaches seem to lead to their own problems.
Not too long ago I got a chance to play the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game. I found it rather lackluster. But I really liked how they'd basically boiled the game down--um, sort of making s "lite" version or it, especially how they handled the characters. So why not use the card game as the starting point for a lite version? I think the main area requiring a lot of work is making the monsters less one-dimensional and more like the character classes. Has anyone tried this already?
Did you try out the Beginner Box ruleset yet? That is a light/intro version to the Pathfinder rules that attempts to simplify a bunch of things. The ACG, while it has Pathfinder in the name, is very divorced from an RPG ruleset. The game is all about resource management and deckbuilding, and doesn’t have anything in the way of roleplaying. Creating balanced custom ACG characters requires you to already be an expert at the game (there are no character creation rules to follow as far as making powers is concerned, so you need to intuitively know what seems overpowered or underpowered). Similarly, there are no rules at all for designing custom other cards. A GM using the cards as a baseline for an RPG would therefore be doing a lot of design work in order to create new cards which fit the storyline. You’d be inventing the vast majority of the rules, at which point it’s more of just playing make believe with the cards rather than playing an actual RPG.