How Do You Use MapTool?

[Chainsaw Hobbit]

I can't seem to figure out any of the controls.

[Badgerish]

There are video-tutorials on the RPtools site, they do a really good job of explaining it. Let me find a direct link

edit: http://www.rptoolstutorials.net/ start with the ones on the top-left.

It's simple once you try, but hard to explain.

[AlterForm]

You can also post directly on their forums; the community over there is very friendly and always willing to help.

[Vitruviansquid]

They have some very helpful tutorials

http://www.rptools.net/index.php?page=tutorials

as well as a wiki full of instructions

http://lmwcs.com/rptools/wiki/Main_Page

[NecroRebel]

Mostly, you use the mouse. In the upper-left corner, just below the File/Edit/Etc. bar, there'll be 5 icons, one of them blue. These icons look like a pointer, a paintbrush, a sort-of-gear-looking-thing, the letters FOG, and an eye. Next to them, there's a line, then another set of icons, which change depending on which of the first 5 are selected. These icons determine what your main cursor does.

Once you notice those, it really becomes fairly simple, but I'll elaborate further. In all cases, left-clicking does what your tool does, while right-clicking and dragging moves the view window around the map.

The "pointer" icon, when selected, works for "interactions," which mostly means moving tokens around. The first sub-tool, which, again, looks like a pointer, lets you click and drag tokens. The second lets you measure distances. To place a token in MapTool, the easiest way is to first have a suitable token in a folder somewhere, then click it in the folder and simply drag it onto the MapTool window.

The "paintbrush" icon lets you draw things. The various sub-tools control what you draw. This is fairly simple, though it's something of a different interface than most other drawing tools and so can take a bit to get used to.

The "gear-thingy" icon is for drawing in where area-of-effects show up. I've not used it, myself, since I just use MapTool for making battle maps.

The "FOG" icon controls fog-of-war and revealing things. Again, I've not used it, so I'm of little use here.

The "eye" icon does topology. Not really sure what that even means.



Regardless, once you've got the basic, "Oh, those things do things!" thing down, getting at least basic maps going is easy. I hope I was at least a bit helpful...

But yeah, watch or read some of the tutorials. They're really quite helpful.