Character Suicide

[Yukitsu]

To be fair Yukitsu it doesn't seem like the problem is "This player keeps throwing himself at situations I say aren't winnable," and more "This guy will abandon the party to go off on his own thing, usually because he's decided to go after the fight that everyone decided they couldn't win. As a result I have to derail the session for a while to show what he's doing while everyone else has to sit on their hands because no one else was up for committing suicide."

Though if I can cast some cynicism on the situation. We're sure the guy is actually at least trying to rp and this isn't just him trying to hog spotlight by throwing his character at situations where he knows he'll be the only one present, right?

While I can understand that that sort of player can be problematic, ultimately, you're trying, I would hope, as a DM to produce interesting scenes and scenarios. It's easy to fall into the trap of trying to tell a story or express a world, but a pretty fundamental part of RP games is getting involved in there, and being in those situations, not just listening to the DM talking about them. Obviously there is some miscommunication about expectations going on at the table, but ultimately, you need to back up a little and ask yourself why those dragons were there in the first place, and why wouldn't the players want to be a part of that if you've made it interesting? A lot of these decisions can be traced to the DM planning out something with an expectation, but the players will almost never follow what you are expecting them to.

In other words, I'd step back a bit and instead of asking about the player's motivations, I'd go into my own first. I think good DMing is about asking what you can do to improve the campaign first, not what actions need to be taken away from players. If it turns out that you did actually have a well thought out reason for those dragons to be there, you have given the player plenty of in game reasons to not do what they are doing and you've not just put in an impossible battle because you thought it would impress your players, then you should move on to thinking about what the players could do differently.

If you really must do all that, as a player, I'd prefer if my DM simply and flatly said "OK, you do that and your character gets killed, roll up a new character." It saves time on an endeavor that he clearly has no intent of letting me succeed in, dice and rules stop being fundamentally necessary to the situation.