So the way I see it, there are a few common obstacles to missions. Here they are, itemized. I'll also try and propose some solutions or something.
1. Mission Length: Missions have been getting longer, yeah. Go reread the Blood Raining Night mission again, and at the front, Past!Nesh talks about how 30 pages is HUUUGE for a mission. Nowadays, that's... pretty average, I think. No real easy fix for that.
2. The Comicbook Problem: As you write more missions, continuity piles up, making the whole thing increasingly inpenetrable to newcomers. A lot of spinoffs get bitten by this, but I think Ix gets it the worst: Ix's spinoffs are really long, but also have a strong character drama focus, with an overarching arc of character development throughout. As such, if you don't read them all, you find yourself at a disadvantage because you're missing stuff—at least, that's the impression I've gotten, part of why I haven't gotten into them yet. Let me know if I'm wrong.
There are a few ways to deal with this:
-Don't build strong continuity: If you don't have a strong arc and character development focus, this isn't so bad for you. Trojie and Pads are a great example of this: that spinoff has a ton of missions, but you can pretty much read whatever you want, and most of them can more or less stand alone. Larf described the spinoff as "like a Saturday-morning cartoon" once, and I think he nailed it. A lot of early spinoffs also did this, as the emphasis was more on the snark and goofiness than the characters in the early days, but they were short enough that it didn't really matter.
-The "Cosmere" Approach: Dubbed as such after Brandon Sanderson's Cosmere. Sayeth TVTropes, Sanderson created the Cosmere because he "desire to create an epic length series without requiring readers to buy a ridiculous amount of books." But TVT isn't the most accurate source, I can't be sure that's true. Anyways he interlinked a ton of shorter series that all stood on their own into a larger, overarching universe. That way, newcomers had a wide variety of entry points, each series was short enough not to overwhelm, and you still got the benefits of a larger, more elaborate setting if you were willing to read all the things. In the PPC, the strongest example of this sort of thing is by far hS. hS's spinoff stuff is big. Really big. There is quite a bit of it. But see, it never feels big, because it's split up into a large number of interconnected series that can be, more or less, read in any order, each with satisfying character arcs (well, most of them, anyways. The arc-centric ones). I first started reading with Lofty Skies, Crashing Down, Not the DIO, Swan's Egg, and Tales from DoGA. But had I gone through Newbies, Origins, Wanderer, DWT, and Elsewhere In Action, I would have been just as able to comprehend things. This is a massive strength, and a credit to hS's writing. It's also a credit that he uses the large cast he has to make the PPC feel really alive and active, and to keep the goofiness of the PPC alive while he actually does genuinely serious character arcs. But enough stroking hS's ego. He doesn't need it.
-Not writing many missions: This is the simple approach: you don't have to manage complexity if you never create it. Although it has its own problems, of course. Many PPCers use this strategy. Like me! (but I'm working on it.)
3. The Canons-you-don't-know problem: I'll be honest... I don't see this as a problem so much. I mean, it is slightly, but it's not disasterous. The first trick is ensuring that people who don't know the canon don't get lost, which... I am notoriously bad at. Heck, I failed to get my Permission first time around for a large part because I didn't give proper context for my characters and most of my betas knew them already such that they couldn't catch the issue ahead of time. Massive failing on my part. So... if you want your mission to be decipherable to people who don't know the canon, get betas who don't know the canon, and get them to tell you when they're confused.
The other trick is holding the uninitiated reader's interest. This is really a test of your abilities as a writer, and of the strength of your agents. Because in the absence of canon knowledge, the horror of the fic's crimes against that canon aren't as strong a draw, nor is the joy of seeing all those bad tropes you see in your ff.net browsings day after day getting ripped into. So what remains is the strength of the characters and their interactions (and their snark—this is the PPC after all), which really ought to be the central focus anyways. We may be critics, but the primary focus of a PPC mission is to entertain.
Part of the reason this has never been so much a probkem is because reading fics in canons I don't know well or don't care about was a big part of my PPC experience. I don't even know if I'd read LoTR when I first stumbled across TOS, and even if I had, I was mocked at the time for not knowing the difference between Barad-dur and Khazad-dun. I wasn't a dedicated Rings fan, but I devoured TOS and OFUM, because they were funny and clever and enjoyable. Heck, a good mission can even get someone into something. Seeing Nume and Illraen deal with Young Wizards made me want to read it just as much as the board threads that were appearing at the time, a Labyrinth mission is what definitively put it on my list for watching (I will, I swear!), if I hadn't read LoTR by then, ToS inspired me to do so, Suicide put GoF on my radar and got me to read it (and made it weird as hell but that's another story), and while Pern had been on my list for a while, Nume, Illraen, and Derik sealed the deal.
That's about it for now.
