In the insurance industry, Accidental Death & Dismemberment, a standard type of life insurance. AD&D is often a mandatory component of employer subsidized group insurance plans. Almost no one in the insurance biz plays advanced dungeons and dragons, but it certainly does seem an eerie coincidence.


When this "accidental death and dismemberment" provision is added to a life insurance policy, it usually works like this. If you have a death benefit of X, and you die as a result of an accident, your beneficiary will receive 2X. Some carry extra caveats concerning auto accidents which say that if you die in a car wreck, the beneficiary will get 3X, and if you're wearing a seat belt, 4X.

The dismemberment provisions get tricky. If you lose 2 limbs and survive, you usually get 2X yourself. If you lose one limb, you usually get 1/2X yourself. There has been more than one occasion where a person has chopped off a limb in order to collect that 1/2X. It's the company's thinking that if you have the balls and the ingenuity to chop off two limbs, you deserve the 2X. (Just kidding; if you're going to do this, you must make it look as if it were an accident.)

Oh, and in the accidental death deal, that means a piano falls out of the sky and kills you, or something that is obviously not premeditated. If you piss off a fellow noder, and they work some sort of voodoo and zap you through your zip drive, that's murder. Your beneficiary only gets X.

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