Experienced Storytellers - Further Advice
This article is targeted towards experienced Storytellers who are new to social skill mentoring or have not worked with Neurodevelopmental Disabilities before. This article covers further advice for ensuring a positive experience.
Things to be aware of:
Your players may be rather different from what you're used to. They may struggle to grasp the rules of the game, and may have rather atypical playstyles or character ideas. For example: one of my players is basically playing 200 characters in a trench-coat.
People on the autism spectrum can vary widely from one another. There is no such thing as a “one size fits all” method. Try to use the first few sessions as an opportunity to observe and learn about the strengths and weaknesses of your players.
You might find that you need to become far more blunt and direct in your words. For example, I have a player who would ask me “are we meeting next week?” and saying things like “we should be” or “that's the plan” aren't direct enough for him to treat as “yes”, so I simply say “yes”.
Some players may be very literal in their understanding of things. They may accept the statements of NPCs as “gospel truths” and struggle to understand that characters may not mean what they say. Learning to understand this is an opportunity for the player to grow, but you should be aware that you may need to revise adventures that rely on the players' seeing through a characters deception.
Not all therapy is helpful. Some, but not all, individuals with autism have been through therapy that was downright harmful. You may encounter individuals with PTSD or prompt-dependency, and there are limits to what you can ethically do to help them as someone without relevant expertise. You may have players who will not speak up in the game unless directly prompted to do so, and so you may need to adjust how you run (non-combat) scenes to ensure they get an opportunity to speak up. If a player “shuts down” in response to something, you need an easy way for the player to silently signal that they are in distress so that you can take their character out of the scene until they signal they are ready to rejoin the game.