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Use Agnostic Tools

by Mike on 22 September 2025

What if you had no access to the digital tools you typically use to prep and run your games. What would you do? How screwed would you be?

Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master resonated with a lot of people for a lot of different reasons. One of those reasons is that the recommendations and steps outlined in Return are generally tool agnostic. You can write out the eight steps on index cards, a fancy pocket notebook, Microsoft One Note, Notion, or Obsidian, and they work just fine. The eight steps are also, generally, system agnostic. I've used them for D&D 2014, D&D 2024, Numenera, Shadowdark, Shadow of the Demon Lord, and other RPGs. They don't work for every RPG, but they work for a lot of them.

I do my prep in Obsidian these days, backed by the incredible cutting edge power of text files, but I could just as easily return to my Moleskine notebook and a pen.

The same is true with other parts of my RPG "stack" – the stuff I use to prep and run games. I like using physical books and dice at my table – virtual or in-person. It's fast and easy to look stuff up, especially if you tab your books. Using physical books makes me feel closer to the game and its history. I know that none of the rest of the tech affects my ability to use books.

I also often use a text editor when running games online to track initiative, turn order, marching order, and abstract distances or zones for combat. I could use fifty different text editors and they'd all work the same. The tools are agnostic from the game.

On the rare occasions where I use a virtual tabletop, I use Owlbear Rodeo because it does the one thing I need – put tokens on a map. I could use Owlbear Rodeo 2.0 or I can host my own copy of Owlbear Legacy. I could use the Simple World Building game world for Foundry for a system-agnostic Foundry baseline. Or I can just take pictures of a map and drop them into our text chat.

For online games, I use Discord for voice, video, and text-based communication but we could probably switch to something else and not miss it too much.

Using system-agnostic tools gives us strength, flexibility, and resiliency when we prep and run our games. Tools, particularly online tools, can fail us. The more focused we are around a single stack of tools, the more dependent we are on them and the harder we fall when they fail us.

Is this the only way to play? No. I know many GMs who love their tightly integrated software – and depend on it to run their games. I'm not saying they're wrong. But there is another way.

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.

Talk Show Links

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

Last week I also posted a YouTube video on the D&D Starter Set – Heroes of the Borderlands – First Look.

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:

Study and keep handy a key of common symbols and terrain markings you can draw on blank poster maps.
Simple terrain features are all you need for a blank battle map.
Be ready for high-level characters to control big monsters. Add more monsters to keep the threat high.
What five scenes are you preparing for your next game?
Drop in an interesting location and situation in the middle of longer journeys between two places.
Throw low challenge monsters at high-level characters. Let them see how powerful they've become.
Shift the story to bigger stakes for higher-level characters.

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