mfrizzell wrote:This really ooks cool but how exactly do you use it with Maptools? I mean i'm geeky enough to just buy one but I'm not sure how I woul use it with MT?
You can use it 2 ways with MT. I use it as both a mouse for navigating around the screen, and as a drawing tool for whipping up maps on the fly.
For example, the party is ambushed on a desolated road by a group of bandits. I grab the Tablo and switch to the drawing tool in MT. I grab a texture that looks like dirt, and I draw the road. I then switch the brush to green, and I draw in the trees and brush in the area. I can then either switch to black to show the PC's wagon, or I normally just drop a wagon image onto the screen.
Once you have the tokens in place and the map sketched up, it's really cool being able to simply touch the tokens and slide them across the screen to move them around. The pen also has a right-click button to make panning the map really easy to use. Combined with my scroll mouse, I can do things much more quickly using both the pen and my mouse at the same time. I should point out that I'm left-handed, so this is pretty intuitive for me, as I use my mouse right-handed. But I imagine that someone who is right-handed can use the pen in their left hand just fine for grabbing and moving tokens, panning the screen or selecting groups of tokens.
One really cool feature of the Tablo is that you can quickly switch from mouse mode to pen mode, making it easy to switch from applications where you use the pen to those you don't.
I love the freedom of being able to create maps "on the fly"; reducing my pre-game prep and giving us more more flexibility in letting the story develop more naturally.
It's probably worth pointing out that we play Fudge/Fate games, so creating minions and monsters for a particular encounter only takes a few seconds. Also movement is measured in Zones, so we don't have to worry about square or hex movement, and use a gridless map. People playing crunchier games might find the pen's uses a bit more limiting, as maps aren't usually created on the fly. But I find working with maps and creating vision blocking much easier with the pen, as it just feels more intuitive than trying to "draw" with a mouse.
I will be using my Tablo this Sunday with my F2F group of 7 players. I will be happy to grab screenshots and post a session follow up to let you know how the device holds up "in real time".
