One of the subsystems that usually gets tinkered with and house ruled in the White Box is the combat system. The original LBBs give us two combat systems, one heavily based on Chainmail and pretty much requires ownership of those rules to use and the so-called alternative system using the twenty sided die. I know a lot of gamers, myself have mentioned how hard it was to find those back in 1977, '78. The ones that sometimes came with the basic Holmes rules were crumbly and hard to read and the twenty sided dice of the day were numbered 0-9 twice. One had to either color code the teens with a separate color or throw a control die, such as a d6 along with the d20. If the d6 came up 1-3 you read the d20 as 1-10 and if the d6 showed 4-6 you read the d20 11-20. Doable, but not as simple as gaming dice have become.
The alternative system became THE system for most people and for later editions. And for some very good reasons. It's quick, can handle large groups of PCs and monsters and higher level play almost as quickly as small groups and low levels. A group can do a lot of exploring in an evening of White Box play. One of the reasons for this quickness was the rules were abstract. Abstraction allows White Box to reduce a lot of combat action to a simple mechanic that only requires the referee to check one table to see if damage is dealt. For some this level of abstraction was fine, others seem to desire a more intuitive approach to combat. For a time in the late 70's the group I played with used a combat system titled Melee.
White Box lends itself well to modification and it was easy enough to lift out the combat mechanics and substitute an alternative. Melee was a Metagaming MicroGame that consisted of a 17 page rules pamphlet, a hex battle map and a sheet of cut-out game markers. Melee, written by Steve Jackson (the American), used similar attributes to the White Box (strength and dexterity) and only six sided dice. For some it seemed more intuitive as Dex controlled one's ability to hit and armor reduced damage rather than making your character harder to hit. There was a companion MicroGame titled Wizard that covered magic using a points system. We toyed with it, but preferred the Vancian magic system of the White Box. Melee and Wizard together were called The Fantasy Trip and were supported by several solo dungeons and eventually a second edition called Advanced Melee and Advanced Wizard. By the time those products were released the group I played with were back to using the d20 combat system from the LBBs. Leveling one's character resulted in periodic increases in one's chance to hit under the LBBs, but Melee based one's ability to hit on the Dex score which didn't regularly improve with attaining higher level. We probably tried creating some tables to make it work, but eventually just settled on modification of the alternate system from White Box.
To this day, I still prefer the simple elegance of the White Box alternative combat system to any other system I have tried. Like many in our hobby, we experimented with more complex rules using "crunchy" combat mechanics and played some of those systems (looking at you Runequest) for many years. White Box's ability to handle many combatants quickly, even at the highest levels allows the game to progress at a good pace and there is nothing more important than effectively pacing the action to keep players and referee engaged.
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