MapTool Education Central

Last updated 10/31/2011

It’s become clear from the large number of posts I’ve devoted to MapTool that I need a page to organize them.  After all, I’ve frequently said that I want my site to be able to help people who decide that they’re interested in creating their own MapTool campaigns, so why don’t I make it a little bit easier for you?

The posts below will take you through my own discovery process with MapTool and my improvements as a MapTool-using dungeon master.  In the future, I’ll be adding to this page to present my own tutorial – what you need to know if you want to run campaigns in MapTool.  Please leave comments to let me know what topics you’d like me to address!

Jumping to the end: My MapTool campaign framework can be downloaded here.

Discovering MapTool: I first learn of this awesome, awesome program.

Getting the images you need for maps: A good place to start for your map-making pleasure.

Playing around with macros and states: Just a little flavor.

Simple monster attack macros: I later decided to make these player-visible rather than using the gm roll option in all of them.

Basic dice macros: Buttons for everyone to roll d20s and the rest.

Player character attack macros: Plus an intro to properties

Multi-target attacks: For your burst and blast pleasure

Campaign frameworks: For the non do-it-yourselfer who wants a finished package

Creating maps with Dungeon Tile Mapper in MapTool: I quickly abandoned this approach

Setting up states in MapTool: Exactly what it says on the tin

Better attacks and properties: Improvements from my first real MapTool game

MapTool with a projector: Oh how I love this!

Brutal weapons: Programming them in MapTool

Generic character tokens: Useful for convention games

Tracking encounter and daily powers: Good stuff for more sophisticated macros

Auras in MapTool: Having MapTool display color-coded auras around a token

Flexible and fast monster templates: Templates for fast monster construction, by role

Ongoing damage macro: A guest post from Paul Baalham

Prepping to run a MapTool game: My weekly process

Macros for numbers on tokens: Useful for showing elevation, for instance

Advanced Macro Topics

JSON objects: Not as scary as I thought they’d be.

JSON arrays: Very useful, but a bit harder than the objects

Library tokens and calling macros from macros: Super-useful, but harder to follow.

Full-on condition tracking: Whew. Lots of macros here. Definitely more advanced.