Surely you mean punishing the character not the player?
The character should have a whole lot of horrible things happen to them. Wake up in a gimp suit? Be kept as "blood on tape"? Raped(1)? At least wake up naked covered in marker pen with inappropriate (and bad) drawing on his face. Certainly, the character should have been robbed of all they had on them.
Maybe that's what the player wants to happen. Are they going for a slow but sure decent into despair? Trying to gain whatever little control they have since the curse is playing havoc with their free will? ...
Alternatively, do have a talk with the player asking them about it. Depending on their reactions, you can either kick them out of the game, let it slide as a "whoops, wasn't I lucky", or commence with the poor character's descent into hell.
(1) Rape is a horrible, violent, and vile thing. It should be reported to the Police if after the fact. Each and every one of us should step in to stop and prevent it, if we ever have the misfortune of being around the event. Most rapist are well known to the victim, this is why "No Means No" is an important message. I hope this state my position on the issue clears: it is a wrong, despicable, vile, and horrible act. However, I have dealt with rape, racisms, mass murder, sociopathy, psychopathy, insanity, torture, paedophilia, xenocide, genocide, and many other horrible things in more than one game. Note that if any of my players objected to a theme, it was dropped without much ado. There is always a full disclosure of themes before I run a game. Some of my players were affected by the above themes and agreed to have them run within my game.
To me it sounds like your player is a mix of being impulsive and a newbie to roleplaying. The newbie elements (needing stuff explicitly explained and such) should work themselves out with time. The impulsiveness usually needs a little bit of work.
Here's what I did once to rebuff the impulsive players in my campaign:
- Set up a wonderful campaign arc that involves the "imminent" death of the party.
- Put impulsive character in a situation where he finds the important "cure"/MacGuffin.
- Both the MacGuffin and dilemma turn out to be fake.
I did this to deal with a combat monster who kept doing stupid things (shooting up places, making a "peace gesture" that got the party shot at, and spooking an extraction target [leading to his death]), and it worked pretty well- he was the face of the group, and decided that when the "nanite antidote" that was supposed to cure the party's impending doom nanite fun death he would drink the whole thing to ensure he didn't die (because only two party members were actually really in danger of death, him being one). Turns out that there were no nanites, and the antidote was cyanide.
That was the opposite of what I should have done.
Mind you, it didn't destroy my group, the player stopped being impulsive, and life went on (for all but that one guy's character). But it was a stupid, brash, inexperienced GM maneuver, and it could've cost me a player. It did have the upside of making everyone else more paranoid, but the impulsive people are still impulsive, they just put a layer of paranoia on their actions (which I guess makes them less impulsive by definition, but doesn't promote good decision making).
Ultimately, you will run into these brash and (frankly) obnoxious players. It's not even a personal fault in them; the three or so I have/had (as their various states of rehabilitation qualify them) in my group are all really nice guys, but they just don't create a coherent character. So here's what I've started to do with them:
- Common Sense; Shadowrunners will recognize this as a name of an edge, and it basically reads like this: "Are you sure?". I encourage my players to all take this edge for all but the most oddball of characters (usually not an issue, since they tend to be played by the players who can handle themselves well).
- "The Talk"; tell them it has to stop, plainly and explicitly. I actually had to do this with one of my players (the cyanide one, in case anyone was wondering) when they played a crazy sociopath Malkavian in Vampire: The Masquerade. Go to the player and tell them in explicit language that their characters' actions have to stop. No qualifications, no debate. If not, character goes bye-bye entirely, due to the fact that he [insert appropriate gaffe here] (the Malkavian was on the intersection of "Shot up the First National Bank at dawn while wearing a Speedo" and "Built a functional nuclear bomb, fumbled while stashing it away", with the former being slightly more likely).
- Veto; most games include very prominent "ask your GM" clauses during character creation. Call that in. The player will fuss about it. They may leave. If they are that disruptive to the game and the group, however, it may be a necessary evil to tell them that their character cannot a) remain under their control and b) remain in the campaign. It doesn't necessarily mean that the character vanishes from the universe and never existed, but he's a NPC now, retires suddenly, or goes out in a blaze of glory. He does not, however, continue acting as he has and sticking with the group.
Disclaimer: You may have other factors leading to this issue.
Wrong Game: The player isn't actually interested in playing this game; even if they're interested in the setting and mechanics, they don't want to abide by them. This is what I call the "Sparkle Vampire" syndrome I occasionally have to deal with from a player who read all the supplements and got a bunch of ideas ("But the book says cyberzombies are only really, really, really hard to create!) that they then assumed would apply to their characters. These are the sort of people who want to play sentient variants of high-level D&D Monster Manual entries, fully sapient human-form mind animals, and the like. If they were playing Eclipse Phase they'd go for the Octomorph and give it a fancy cybernetic suite including jet thrusters.
Bad Player: I hesitate to call someone a "Bad Player", but it's true that some people prefer to play things revolving around them. While this is natural, some people take this to an additional extreme, and must make everything they play revolve around them all the time. Sometimes this leads to "The Talk" (see above), and sometimes this just means they won't have fun in the game and should pursue something else.
GM Ineptitude: Note that I'm not accusing you here, and I'll keep the examples my own. I used to run an Eclipse Phase game, and I made the players into hard hitting immortal cyborg soldiers. It lasted three runs. My players got bored because they had no consequences for failure. I ran a Remnants game. It failed because the players kept running into issues where their (overly large) group kept falling apart on matters of dogma or running into massively high power gradients. This same group has been in a Shadowrun campaign that lasted for almost a third of a year with weekly sessions, and the reason it ended was due to scheduling conflicts and getting far outside the realm of mortal power. It's not that this even means I'm a bad GM, it just meant that I was aiming for something and my players weren't, and there was a communication breakdown or I tried to push it on them too hard (or I over-hyped them).
Best Answer
Yes, let his character get the fate he deserves
Storytime:
In one of the first games I ever ran at a convention, there was a player that was doing exactly what you described: charging ahead, thinking he was better than everyone, not playing as a team, etc.
The next time he charged ahead though, all the enemies were of course waiting to gang up on the first person in range, which was enough to take him down. The rest of his party waited a few rounds before healing him (rationalizing it as "cautiously dealing with the enemy", but it was pretty obvious what they were doing). This was all orchestrated maturely and politely by an older lady (a mother, playing a cleric), and was one of the best examples of subtle peer pressure I've seen.
He only missed a few rounds of playing, but the subtext was clear: "your team-mates are not happy with you, and have the ability to hang you out to dry". He played much more nicely after that.
TL;dr - yes, let his character get the fate he deserves.