1. My primary team is in Implausible Crossovers, but I kept running into Sues that annoyed me enough to want to kill. I didn't want to keep having to make up excuses for my DIC team to get Suefics, so I needed a team in the DMS.
   
   2. To cover more of my favorite continua, with characters who feel as strongly as I do about them. Nume and Ilraen prefer certain flavors of fantasy and sci-fi, and neither of them has a musical bone in his body. If I wanted to deal with my favorite musicals, I needed other characters for that. (I still don't have anyone I'd easily send into modern, more or less realistic settings like Psych or NCIS, but since I haven't seen any fics there I really want to PPC, either, that's been okay.)
   
   3. To be able to tell different kinds of jokes than I can with Nume and Ilraen. They're both fairly serious, straight-faced people who don't use a lot of modern slang, so if I wanted to crack jokes based on Internet memes, or write about pranks pulled during a mission, I needed someone else for that.
   
   Additionally, I dislike it when people recruit badfic characters and then don't do anything with them. Once I decided I was going to recruit Derik, there was no question that I was going to write about him, and he fit half of what I wanted to do as a storyteller. Earwig didn't work out for me, but then Gall came along, and thanks to her canon's tendency to be anachronistic, she fits the other half and also acts as a balance to Derik's overwhelming tendency to be angsty and grim (which is not how I set out to write him, but characters will do what they do). It's also good for me to have a female character besides Jenni.
   
   As for who gets what mission, it's a simple question of a) is it a Suefic or a crossover? and b) would my characters know/care about the problems in it enough to have entertaining reactions?
   
   I've tried to alternate writing one DIC story, then one DMS story, etc., but it really just depends on what story I'm feeling most strongly about at any given time.
   
   ~Neshomeh

1) They take turns, simple as that.

2) Same as the above, really. I do a mission with one team, then I do mission with the others and if I don't have a fic ready, I go dig one up. My first team used to be in Floaters and now they're in the Department of Improbabilities, so they can work a wide range of canons and badfic types.
My other team is still in Floaters, but I'm making them do bad Harry Potter/Labyrinth crossovers, since that gets them both riled up.

3) MY first pair get along great, so after a few missions with them, I wanted a team that would bicker and fight all the time, just for variation. And then I did a really horrible fic, with a couple of bit characters I thought were salvageable and decided to use them,

Namely, one of my teams gets a little time in the spotlight for a given number of missions, and may or may not have a mini-story arc to go with it. Note of course that this primarily applies to solo-written missions, as my co-writes with others have so far not adhered to the same organization. Secondary RCs tend to have missions done sporadically or as supporting material for other teams, which is what I'd recommend for people who haven't made the mistake I did of writing... *counts on fingers* three major teams (one of which I'm planning to write an epilogue for in due course), one supporting team, and at least five other supporting characters who turn up here and there.

In light of this, having different teams be part of different departments is also helpful for organizing who gets what. To continue using my agents as examples: Rayner and E.V.L. take on fics that have a Suvian character and are part of only one fandom; Sarah, Cupid, and Lapis deal exclusively with crossovers; and Falchion, Rashida, and Ripper get... well, everything else.

If it's not a Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha mission, it's Des and Lump. If it is, it's probably Navare and Amris. The reason is simple — N\A are APD-Nanoha; Des and Lump are Floaters.

Carefully.

My personal advice is to hold off on writing another agent pair until you have an idea of what you're doing with your first set.

There's no need to have a dozen or more agents spread out throughout all the PPC and then basically render yourself unable to write anything because you can't decide.

That said, they also don't have to actually have their own spin-off. You can feature them in your main spinoff, interacting with your first two agents, or use them in RP, and so on. Or in stories set in HQ that aren't missions at all.

Right now I have a bunch of things in the works, spread out over a variety of characters- the thing is to make sure you keep focused on *something* so you have something to show for it, writing wise.

-July, productive lately

1) By having a whole bunch of missions on the go at once and maybe someday finishing any of them.

2) I listen to them all complain about it and whoever's got the funniest lines gets to go on the mission.

3) Because I want to. =]