Variety for Campaign Longevity

Variety in challenges and activities

Gygax believed the key to an enjoyable game was variety in activities: 

• fights and action ("roll-play"), 
• talk and interaction ("role-play"), and 
• problem solving and exploration 

Fixation on a single aspect of the RPG form makes for tedious play to my thinking. All combat, all exploration, all yakking, all problem solving, all any single thing is downright dull. Balanced play is about half of the favored aspect, with the others having lesser time in the adventure session--sometimes hardly any, although they should then dominate a near-future session. #6459

Forget the business about role-playing. It is as boring as rule-playing and roll-playing are when made the focus of the game. Notice that I stress game, as that's what is the main operative word in the description of the activity. The majority of persons engaged in RPG activity love to go on dungeon crawls, so the ToH was designed to challenge the best of that lot. #2359

As false to the game form as the pre-scripted "story," is play that has little more in it than seek and destroy missions, vacuous effort where the participants fight and kill some monster so as to gain more power and thus be able to look for yet more potent opponents in a spiral that leads nowhere save eventual boredom. So pure hack and slash play is anathema to me too. [36]

What he thought to be a detraction of the fun was

• focus on and arguing over rules ("rule-play")

Over some decades of gaming, the creation of some number of RPG systems, I have come to the point where I prefer a rules-light system [...]. I do not like to rule-play, and as a GM I find long lists of stats and the like tedious. Such things tend to get in the way for my style of play, including as a PC. While I do enjoy plenty of roll-playing (after all I am a military miniatures player too), centering the game on combat seems fatuotous to me. I want a game that facilitates all of the elements of the RPG. #535

Most people enjoy roll-playing and role-playing, but rule-playing is a complete bore #8523

He felt that discussing rules was never enjoyable, and a focus on rules only limited the imagination. It is focused on artificial simplifications that never can do a situation believable justice. It also is less likely to be objectively resolved in a stress sitution for the characters. In my opinion, the best way to resolve these issues is to have the DM make a call, accept it, take a note of it, and research it after the game to agree how to handle it going forward if it comes up again. 

Variety in Adventure Type

There also was variety in the environments -- mixing up dungeon delving with wilderness exploration, with city adventure and intrigue.

Mix up the adventure settings so that play is not always in the same dort of place. A town adventure leads to a wilderness trek, that brings the party to a subterranian setting for example. From there they might have a waterborne or aerial mission.  #6966

Variety in Genre 

Beyond even the kind of adventures, when people got bored with the medieval fantasy he leavened it with adventuring in other genres -- from Science Fiction or Planetary Romance on Barsoom or Vance's Planet of Adventure, to settings inspired by movies like King-Kong, or books like Alice in Wonderland, even to adventures in contemporary New York City. In this, the backdrop stayed the medieval fantasy campaign, but he had about one session in ten with such other environments, to keep it fun. 

Spot in in regards to having PCs adventure in different environments. I believe that keeps them, and the GM alike from growing complacent, or bored. Ernie's PC read a curse scroll and got sent to Barsoon--ERB's Mars, of course.  #1842

Actually, the scope need not be restricted to the medieval; it can stretch from the prehistoric to the imagined future, but such expansion is recommended only at such time as the possibilities in the

medieval aspect have been thoroughly explored. [1, Introduction].

These days, rather than breaking the versisimilitude of the world by doing this, I'd rather just play some other system for variety. In our student days, we alternated D&D with Call of Cthulhu, or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. And even back then there were Traveller, Boot Hill and so on.