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High-Value Tips, Tricks, and Tools

by Mike on 17 August 2026

Some tips, tricks, or tools we use when prepping or running our RPGs provide multiple benefits for minimal effort, giving us super lazy GM powerhouse tricks. These high-value tricks take little time, money, or effort and yet give us several benefits in our games. What are your own high value lazy GM tricks?

Here are some examples.

One-Year Later Montages

At the end of a campaign, I like to have the players describe where their characters end up one year after the final events of the game. These one year later montages offer multiple benefits:

Players get the ending they want.
I don't have to come up with unique endings for each character.
All the players enjoy hearing the stories of each character.
The GM gets to relax and listen to our players’ fantastic stories.
It ties a nice bow on the end of the campaign.

The "one year later" montage gives us a high-value low-drag technique for creating fantastic conclusions to long-running campaigns.

Campfire Tales

Similarly, occasionally asking players to describe what their characters are thinking or feeling when camping out is an easy tool with multiple benefits:

You get to hear what the players are thinking about the game.
You help players get into the heads of their characters.
It builds bonds between characters and players.
It shows you what players remember about past events or look forward to in the future.
It stays in the world so it has the benefits of a meta-conversation but without having to break character.

Player Summaries of Previous Sessions

Some GMs like to summarize previous sessions themselves but I always like to ask the following question when our game begins:

"Who would like to describe what happened in last session's game?"

Asking players to summarize the previous session has multiple benefits:

It defines the beginning of the game and gets everyone on board to play.
It rewards players who take notes during the game.
It shows you what players remember from the last session.
It helps you correct or reinforce important things that shouldn't be missed.
It's an easy question to ask that doesn't require any prep.

Read more on these sorts of ideas in Empowering Player-Driven Storytelling.

Handouts

Preparing handouts isn’t exactly lazy but they offer a lot of value for the effort. An example handout might be the physical note found on a dead minion of a boss. Read Making Great Handouts for tips and tricks to make great handouts. Such handouts can be physical or digital if you're playing online. Here are some of the benefits physical handouts offer:

Handouts help you focus your prep around the ideas articulated in the handout.
Handouts help players focus their attention on the important story elements described in the handout.
Handouts give your players something they can physically touch, pass around, and read later.
Handouts draw your players further into the world with an object that feels like it's from that world.
Handouts help you think through the eyes of your villains – assuming they're the one who wrote the handout.

Monuments

I love using fantastic monuments as the focal point or backdrop to a scene – whether in a city, during travel, or found in dungeons deep. The core adventure generators from the Lazy GM's Resource Document includes tables you can use to generate and flavor monuments with origins, conditions, and effects. Monuments are easy to roll up or improvise and offer a lot of advantages.

Monuments are fantastic vehicles for secrets and clues.
With faction lists you can tie monuments to the factions in your world.
Monuments anchor scenes. They act like the backdrop of a play.
Monuments can give the characters something to interact with.
Monuments with interesting effects can add variables to combat encounters.

Player-Defined Monster Descriptions

Instead of identifying monsters as “troll 1” through “troll 4”, ask your players to identify an interesting physical characteristic of a particular troll after they damage it. Read more about this trick in A Troll Named Handbag. Identifying monsters using physical characteristics trick has several advantages.

They draw players into the fiction of the world instead of just mechanics.
They give you a more interesting way to identify monsters than a letter or number.
They let you identify monsters in theater of the mind combat.
They make each monster unique.

Player Roles

Player roles give players particular jobs to help our games run even more smoothly. When our games begin, we can ask players to take on specific activities during our game such as:

Cartographer (drawing maps).
Initiative manager (handling initiative).
Scribe (taking notes to share with the group).
Quartermaster (tracking loot).
Caller (arbitrating decisions among the group).

These player roles have several advantages:

They take a burden off of the GM for these activities.
They keep players engaged in the game outside of their turns.
They create artifacts for the game you can review between games or years later.
They bring the GM and players on the same level – you're all just playing the game together.

Index Cards

Index cards are an incredibly flexible tool for RPGs. I wrote more about them in Ten Ways to Use Index Cards. Here are some ways index cards provide a lot of value:

Using as Initiative Tents
Tracking damage done to monsters
Writing secret notes to players
Recording quests
Writing down magic item descriptions
Taking game notes

Throw some index cards in your GM kit and you won’t be sorry.

Blank Battle Mats

I've been a sucker for blank battle mats for decades. I love both the Pathfinder Basic Flip Mat and the Chessex Battle Mat. These blank battle mats have several advantages:

You can draw side-views of locations.
You can write down character names oriented around the table to keep track of the spotlight.
You can draw small maps of regions or dungeons.
You can draw larger maps of combat encounter locations.
You can draw strange symbols the characters find in their journeys.

Just a Taste

This list is just a taste of useful tips, tricks, and tools that offer several advantages for a low amount of effort in our RPGs. What are your favorite tricks and what multiple advantages do they offer you as you prep and run your games?

More Sly Flourish Stuff

Each week I record an episode of the Lazy RPG Talk Show (also available as a podcast) in which I talk about all things in tabletop RPGs.

Last Week's Lazy RPG Talk Show Topics

Here are last week's topics with time stamped links to the YouTube video.

Patreon Questions and Answers

Also on the Talk Show, I answer questions from Sly Flourish Patrons. Here are last week's questions and answers.

Prep Between Sessions for Larger Campaigns

Talk Show Links

Here are links to the sites I referenced during the talk show.

Last week I also posted a couple of YouTube videos on Lazy Campaign Prep Part 2 and The Aberrant Sewers — Dragon Empire Prep Session 76.

RPG Tips

Each week I think about what I learned in my last RPG session and write them up as RPG tips. Here are this week's tips:

Offer meaningful choices in each scene you run.
Bait dangerous situations with a hint at loot.
Mix minions, standard monsters, big brutes, and dangerous bosses in big multi-wave battles.
Players always target bosses first. Are you ready?
Don’t make your battle arenas too small. Use distance to complicate large encounter areas.
Treat magical monuments as monsters. Let characters destroy them with physical or magical attacks or inflict damage with skill checks.
Draw circles for every ten hit points a monster has. Put a slash through it when it takes five damage or an X for ten. Round to the nearest five. It dies when all the circles are Xed.

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