Yes, the players. The people who make up the RP itself are, in fact, one of the biggest problems with trying to continue an RP with a 'sequel'. This is more referring to the players who stuck with the first RP all the way thru or (if the first is still continuing) are still a part of it than any new players.

The 'veteran' players have a high tendency to ignore new players and solely interact with other 'veteran' players, leading to all kinds of problems and drama. Besides scaring off new players, this also lends toward creating petty disputes and hostilities that only help to beat down an RP community.

If you make a sequel to an ongoing or finished RP, make sure you go out of your way (and make it clear that others should too) to interact as often as possible with new players so they don't feel like they just stumbled into a private session.

Using old characters from the base RP that the sequel is based upon does nobody any good if they don't know anything about them. How will the new player know to keep away from a certain character or to not try to attack another if they aren't even aware of who that character is?

This can easily be negated by players reading up on that character, not a huge task sure, but it becomes a tedious chore to do over and over when you've got more than one returning character.

I get that players may like to use that character, having grown attached to them and becoming used to their In-RP character. That's fine, great even. But unless players give enough of a quick synopsis on that character to catch new players up on who they are, it doesn't really help anyone.

Dropping references to significant events in the first RP ties in with this but I'll talk about that next.

A character died, someone gained godlike powers, another was risen from the dead as an unholy lich, or hell, a continent disappeared off the face of the planet. Any one of these would count as a major event in in an RP and as such they should NOT be referenced to out of the blue in sequels when there is a chance that new players hasn't been able to even read about them yet.

Dropping random references that only 'veteran' players get is like being that asshole who constantly drops inside jokes that only he and one other friend get just to try and show up the others around him with a private 'Only WE get this because I'm a closer friend to him than you.'. It makes others feel uncomfortable and ignorant and that, obviously, causes no end of trouble.

As with the last point, if you're going to drop any references then you NEED to explain them, even if it's just a line saying 'X was the Y of Z before the Blank occurred in southern Thing'. Players may not exactly understand FULLY what happened but they'll get it a lot easier now.

Biggest and Final problem with trying to do sequels to ongoing or finished RPs is the story of the base material. The first RP is, say, over 600+ pages. That's 12 posts a page for most people, and while you can MAYBE cut that down to 500+ if you cut out any posts that are just OOC you're still looking at over 6000 posts worth of story for new players to cover.

When you try to say that a player needs to read the base material to understand whats going on, or worse, to even apply to join a sequel RP, you're essentially taking your hand, shoving it up their ass, and then trying to move them like a puppet. Sounds fun right?

Not everyone has as much free time as I do, that's something I ALWAYS keep in mind when creating or posting in an RP. I realize that my hours are irregular for most, seeing as the majority of RPs on sites like PMC are run by younger kids who are at school for most of the day if it's not summer. As such, I keep in mind that not everyone has the time or mental capability to sit down and read 6k posts, all while other things are happening in their lives.

Mind you, that isn't an excuse to not read 20 measly pages in a new RP just because you don't 'have the time' (20 pages is maybe 6-10 minutes(?) if you're above the 5th grade level if you don't throw in any reading disabilities.) and then complain about how you don't know what's going on.

Simply put: FOOTNOTES! Take them and put them on a sequel RP so players can look and go 'Oh OK! So that's why magic works like that' or 'I see! Now I get why technology has actually digressed.'. People will thank you and you're RP will prosper because of it.