Herpes, (I feel funny typing that), you have some great insight into this.
I was careful to remain gender neutral, but Herpes' inclusion of the female gender in describing his problem player, will allow me to also reveal that our player in question is also female. Which makes me wonder whether this archetype is unique to the female persona. I don't know. Perhaps some Y-chromosome lacking individuals on here will have to shed some light on that topic.
This player remains aloof, and standoffish during the game. The only time she really involves herself is when she is rolling lots of dice, and dealing lots of damage. So, she talks a lot about role-playing, and interaction, and backstory, but when it comes right down to interacting with NPCs in the game, it is almost certain that she never will.
Her first few characters in our campaign were fighters - a fighter, and then a paladin, and she seemed happy with those. IMC, she played a rogue and grew bored with it because she felt outclassed by the fighters and magic users. So, she asked if she could abandon that character, and then replaced her with another - a fighter. But, her rogue character was a human, but she made her a - get this, a lycanthropic snow leopard. But the thing about it was, was there was really no reason for it. It was just there. So, I worked up a snow leopard lycanthrope template for her, and gave her the ability to shapechange into snow leopard, and dropped a lot of the unbalancing silver DR stuff, and gave her a +1 ECL. She seemed happy with that. During the course of that character's life, she never revealed to anyone in the party, nor did she ever shapechange into that form. I also don't have any reason to believe that at any point in the campaign would she have had a need to shapechange into a snow leopard. So, it was almost like playing a normal human without some weird secret was a foreign concept to her.
Come to think of it, those games that we played without her, were some of the more entertaining ones. Maybe it was because it was all guys, I don't know. One other consideration is the fact that she had a baby last winter, so she could still be having some hormonal problems as a result of that, and it's coming out in her characters, and her role-playing, although her past history of characters leads me to believe otherwise, though it could be more pronounced.
Given that this group is not one I'll be playing with, this is only an exercise in philosophy for me. I'm not searching for "solutions", since it literally isn't my problem any more.
