Trad RPG manuals are notoriously long. But it doesn't have to be that way!
If you don't want to change your system, you can go with an
epitome. There are a couple of these for D&D 5e, for instance,
Stan Shin's or
Ozuro's. These are sometimes conceptualized as "GM's screens," but there's basically no reason not to have every player have one as a handout.
But then there are the hacks/retroclones/whatever that are designed with concision in mind.
Knave fits on
one double-sided sheet of paper. Into the Depths can be
one page side or
two double-printed pages. The
old Microlite d20 site is full of slightly different small retroclones of both 3e and earlier editions.
It should be easy to add exception-based mechanics of your choice to these, especially if you're dealing with the Slimfast version of a system that already has a lot of mechanical doodads. I've contemplated stitching together something like Microlite d20 +
Spheres of Power/Might +
E6, for instance. Turning that into a self-contained document that ironed out all the kinks would be a fair amount of work, but just stating the premise gets you 90% of the way there, at least in terms of functionality.
(I've focused on D&D here because its popularity + the uniquely lax copyright of 3e has allowed for an almost infinite variety of experimentation and hacking among trad RPGs, and storygames already often focus on light rules implementation (and aren't really my thing.) But there's no reason to limit the principles here to D&D, of course.)
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discoursedrome mentions that Pathfinder is problematic. Setting aside many other ways in which it could be problematic, like many open-source projects, Pathfinder is pointlessly complex, but also has a lot of fun bits once you realize what fun is to be had in delving through them. There's a certain kind of fun that, I think, can come from the combination of (1) "limitng" yourself to the extremely large palette of races, classes, magic systems, &c. that the edition has and (2) running with the assumption that rules are an approximation of in-game logic, rather than anything as plebian as an aid to play games.
