How does one use a Battlemap?

[Midgardsormr]

I use a laptop loaded with the VTT MapTool. I run two instances of MT: one GM's view, which I can see on my screen, and one players' view, which I display on my television connected via the HDMI port. This gives me the benefit of being able to use large, full-color maps every session with no printing costs, automatic fog-of-war and line-of-sight tools, and a handy way to show additional visual aides like NPC portraits.

Of course, this does lose a bit of the tactile interaction of using minis, but I never really used minis to start with so no loss for me there.

[Scorpius]

If I had coffee in my mouth, while reading the last post I would have spit it out. Often I have a hard time justifying spending allot of time making maps since I'm the only one who sees them.

Generally my battlemap process goes like this: 1. Create map on graphpaper/GIMP. 2. Draw dumbed down version of map on Paizo flip-mat. 3. Fight! 4. Erase map. 5. Repeat steps 2-3 until it becomes needed to start back at 1

These days I'm doing less with paper and more with my Laptop. I've got Obsidian Portal for my Campaign, a Dropbox for my sessions/encounter and Gimp for my maps. I'm going to look into a connector for my Mini-DVI port to the TV. That way I can show them the detailed view as well. I don't think we'll stop using mini's.