Troupe play in play-by-post campaigns

[Agemegos]

<edited for a complete re-write. Much briefer and more to-the-point now>

How well is PBP role-playing suited to campaigns in which each player has multiple characters, and plays whichever one happens to be involved in the action from time to time?


The reason I ask is that I have a campaign scheme in mind based on Star Trek-like exploration in a much grittier setting. The Old Series' power trio made much better television than it would have done for the captain and XO to stay on the ship where they belong and beam down specialists to do the scientific and diplomatic work on the ground. But if you divide the work in a sensible fashion among planetologists, sociologists, diplomats, naval officers, and security "officers" then no one character offers a viewpoint into all important phases of the work.

The solution I have in mind is for each player to play one of the senior officers who will be involved when the mission commander takes advice from his heads of department, and one subordinate of each of the others. Then you can have an adventure in which a problem is discovered by the explorers, discussed by the heads of departments, and then passed to the diplomats to solve, leading to the marines having to rescue the diplomats all being played out by the same players.

I've been thinking about this campaign for a while, but in my circumstances I have no chance to play it out around a table. I tried it out in a Skype game that didn't work out, but I think that was because of problems with scheduling, the limitations of VOIP, and my own health, not because the campaign is cursed or anything.


Would this campaign idea be a good thing to try out using PBP, do you think? How well does play-by-post handle "troupe style" RP, in which each player players several characters? I would have guessed that it had a big advantage in reducing the confusion over which of his or her several characters a player was playing at a particular time. Has anyone tried it?