Dongheon Cha: I did play some in elementary school, with my cousin, off and on. I really didn’t play too much until I got into high school and Tony introduced me to the rest of the guys.

Ken Godbille: Usually lunch didn’t take the whole 50 minutes, so you were left wondering what to do. And after school, we would continue the game. When you start a game of D&D, typically it’s a story. So think about reading a novel. You pick up a novel, you can read like 10 or 15 minutes of it at lunchtime, before your next class. And then you go home, and if you can get everybody together, you want to finish it.

Beck: When was the first time that this group played D&D together?

Dennis Kudlik: It would probably have to be Greg’s freshman year. Because that is the only time we were all in high school at the same time.

Greg: The nature of the game makes it so you don’t have to have the exact same players every time. A player and their character can be absent for a game session. It’s kind of like an episode of a show where one character doesn’t appear in it. So it’s hard to say exactly when the first time the eight people that regularly play together now were together in the same room.

Ken: I had 1988 on one of my characters. I was just looking.

Dennis: We’ve been doing games fairly consistently since then. How D&D normally works is that there’s a game master who is running the game. They’re the narrator of the story. And the different people are the different characters in the story. It’s an interactive story—the dungeon master will tell you, This is going on; this is what you see. And then you get feedback from the players on what they want to do. It can be a never-ending story. You’ll use the same characters as long as nothing horrible happens to them. Of the characters that we’re playing right now in this current game, one was created in 1990. We’ve been playing with a lot of these same characters for 25-plus years at this point.

Beck: When did the campaign that’s ongoing now start?

Greg: We actually have two of them that are that old. I think my Greyhawk campaign started in 1990. And the other one, the Racteria campaign, started in 1991. Greyhawk and Racteria are the name of the worlds that they’re set in. Greyhawk was the original campaign world that Gary Gygax made when he wrote Dungeons & Dragons. It’s kind of the historical campaign setting.

Beck: Is Racteria one you guys made up yourselves?

Greg: Yes. That’s the one that we created ourselves.

Beck: Do you use the same characters for both of those campaigns, or do they each have their own unique characters? Have they both had a continuous story line this whole time?

Chuck Sanderson: There are different characters for each campaign. And for Racteria, we each have multiple characters. We have campaigns for high-, low-, and mid-level characters, which were all started at different times. The high-level one has been around for 25 years. Each category of levels has different challenges. When you’re the all-powerful high-level character, you can save every village from everything.