Mistaken Identity [-5] is a mundane physical disadvantage. There is someone else who is frequently mistaken for you. Since this is a disadvantage, this will result in you getting caught up in things you don’t want to be involved with, learning things you don’t want to know, being a target for his enemies, and so on. It appeared in Compendium I for GURPS 3e.
If the person you’re mistaken for is, or becomes, an Enemy of yours, he may well be an Evil Twin. If all the members of your race look
identical to outsiders, you don’t have this disadvantage, although you do have an interesting [0] feature, and likely Taboo Trait for appearance-related traits. My father and his brother were identical twins, and readily mistaken for each other, but they quite enjoyed the confusion, and it never did any harm, so it was presumably a [0] feature.
This disadvantage isn’t often mentioned in GURPS supplements.
Bio-Tech uses it for people with transplanted faces and mass-produced clones, and offers surgery to duplicate someone else’s appearance.
Monster Hunters makes it an option for biological creations, and
Steampunk for mass-produced robots.
Mistaken Identity has shown up twice in games I was in. In the Elizabethan campaign, one PC had it, and was surprised when a harried-looking man marched up to him, said “Found you at last!” gave him a handful of papers and dashed off. They seemed to be a script for a play, so he went to
The Theatre and found that everyone there recognised him as
Will Kemp, the leading clown of the company. Since the kind of man who would later morris-dance from London to Norwich is clearly capable of deciding that pretending to be someone else is funny, his denials were rejected, and he found himself roped into rehearsals. His consistent failure to be funny was beginning to arouse doubts after several hours, when the real Will Kemp showed up, and the company let him go.
The other occasion was early in Infinite Cabal, when the characters were operating in a parallel very similar to their home world, but 25 years later. One of the PCs had Mistaken Identity, a Dependent and Weirdness Magnet. That world’s version of his Dependent recognised him, shocking her severely, since he’d died 27 years earlier. It was something that just had to happen, once I’d realised how the disadvantages implied it.
Has Mistaken Identity entertained in your games? If so, has it been bought off, as both the characters in my anecdotes did?