2024 New Light Wrap-Up

Another year gone, another year to wrap up. Let's get to it 👏

Iron Banner Conclusions

In November, an antagonistic group of Guardians known as Fireteam Avalon made a political play to get alien Guardians banned from the City. They used the arena of the Iron Banner as their main method of social pressure and support. The better Fireteam Avalon did in the Iron Banner, the more influence they had over the culture of the City.

Our PCs did not stand for this. They spent the whole month coordinating efforts to defeat Fireteam Avalon at every turn, both in the Iron Banner and in wider society. Players posted over 5,300 times in a single thread, working together to combine resources and knowledge to achieve their shared goal. Players and GMs also created 56 roleplay threads for characters to express themselves, for a grand total of over 150,000 words written in November. (One of these threads accumulated over 11,000 words in less than 24 hours!) All of this doesn’t even take In-Character Message Board into account, which had its own slew of posts.

And we’re not done yet!

We’re taking in everything you all did—the NPCs you talked to, the decisions you made, the rolls you got—and writing a lorebook to conclude this storyline. It’s going to take us a little while to complete this, so we ask for patience. Chapters will be posted to our Discord server as they finish. We’ll also make the formal announcement on who won the tournament, and the exclusive Lord’s Blessing exotic weapon, at the end of the lorebook.

Community Round Table

Join us on Discord on December 12th, at 1:00 pm US Central [Discord event link], as we reflect on everything that happened this past year in the New Light campaign. We’ll go over the good and the bad, the stuff we loved, and the stuff we want to change. We’ll be taking questions and comments from the community as we do so, and we have some questions for you, too. You can pitch in by responding to our 2024 Year-End Survey [link].

December Dormancy

December is always a month off for our GMs, in terms of running New Light games. You might still see GMs running one-shots for other systems, or non-canonical 2e sessions using the New Light universe as the backdrop for them. It’s all very chill as we turn our major focus to the holiday and to our families.

For the dev team, this is also a time to make major updates and changes to the campaign. This is much easier to do when we don’t have to worry about sessions happening anytime soon. We have a few game balance changes to make, too, which will require some of our players to update their character sheets. You can expect announcements on these changes toward the end of December/beginning of January.

December Downtime Update

Right now, we have one big change to the way we’re handling downtime. In the past, you could only hold up to 28 days of downtime at a time. This isn’t changing. However, we are introducing rollover downtime (RDT), a way for players to keep downtime days past the usual 28, albeit in a more limited way.

Going forward, if you’re at the 28 day maximum for downtime, any further downtime you accumulate will go into your PC’s rollover downtime. Rollover downtime can only be spent on the Express Yourself downtime option. You can hold up to 80 days of rollover downtime, which is nearly 3 months of downtime progress you don’t have to lose, if you have to take a break from the campaign.

Also! At the end of the year, we give all our active PCs 30 days of downtime (this ignores the normal stored limit) to use right away at the beginning of the month. We want players to be able to get all their downtime for the month done now, before the holidays hit and people might not have time to manage character sheets.

This time, all active PCs were awarded 60 days of downtime: +30 in their stored days (ignoring the usual limit, as is normal for December) and +30 in their rollover days. Furthermore, the PCs who went into the Black Garden got an additional 60 rollover days on top of this (ignoring the usual 80 total limit), to account for how much longer than expected it took to resolve that leg of the story. Yes, your characters can lose out on downtime opportunities based on their gameplay decisions, but the Black Garden was beyond what we anticipated as developers and we want to fix that.

Once we resume sessions in January, you’ll be back to the usual 28 day limit. Any amount of unspent stored days will shift into your rollover days on January 1st, to a maximum of 80 RDT days.

Patreon Changes

As a reminder, our Patreon is undergoing significant changes in 2025. You can read more about them here [link]. With these changes, our Discord server will also be updated. Players in the New Light campaign will temporarily lose access to campaign channels while we update permissions.

If you have any questions or concerns, please reach out to us! And as always, we really appreciate having you here <3

2024 Year-End Stats

I want to sign off this update with some year-end stats to review. Let’s start with looking at some graphs to get an idea of where our PCs are at.

Class Distribution

Sunsingers and gunslingers continue to be the most popular class on server. Sunsingers make up 15.1% of the population, and gunslingers make up 16.1%. The next highest played class is the voidwalker at 11.8%. Our least played classes are a tie between bladedancers and strikers, both at a population of only 7.5%.

We have a fairly even distribution among the superclasses. Warlocks are slightly more popular at 38%, and Titans are slightly behind at 29.3%. Hunters sit very close to average at 32.6% of the population.

41.9% of our PCs are a solar class (gunslinger, sunbreaker, or sunsinger), making solar the most popular affinity to play as.

PC Levels

The level cap is currently 12th, and no PCs are at this level yet. The majority of our PCs are currently at 6th level (19.4% of the population), with the second highest amount a tie between 9th level and 5th level (15.1% of the population).

Session Stats

When it comes to sessions themselves, we had an absolutely jam-packed year with 256 total sessions run: 178 patrols, 29 story missions, and 49 Origin Stories. I, GoodGameKitty, personally ran 79 D&Destiny sessions this year. Here’s some other fun numbers to consider:

• Total Final Deaths: 1

• Total Dragon's Deals: 20

• Most Dragon's Deals in One Month: 9 were taken in July 2024

• Highest Loot Drop in 2024: 116,000 glimmer in a single Patrols session

• 2024 Year-End PC Count: 93

• 2024 Year-End Player Count: 76

• Most Popular Month: Tie between October and September (37 sessions each)

• Special shoutout to the character Nyx, who ended the year with the highest number of supers cast in a single session. Nyx casted 7 supers in the course of 3 hours of gameplay, for a rate of 2.33 supers per hour.

• 2024 Dev Team Thankfulness Rating: TEN BAJLLION PERCENT!!! THIS YEAR WAS AMAZING!!!!!!!!!

We’ll see all your PCs again in session next year. Until then, feel free to continue roleplaying in threads and spend your downtime wisely.

Make good choices, and have a happy holiday season!