I'm trying to make doodle type art (kind of like in the iPhone app Doodle Jump) and am having trouble. I draw the art by hand, then scan it as a .bmp, and import it, and convert it into a path (just one color, BTW). But sometimes my pen is thinner or thicker than I'd like. So I want to increase the path's width without increasing the dimensions of the object (I don't want to scale the path--I want to make it thicker).

Could anyone help me do this? I can't find any buttons or editors to make a path thicker.

Tweak tool can do that, try reading about it in the guide although the toolbar you see with this tool should give enough hints

There IS a way to increase the width of an Inkscape stroke (or stroked path) using the Fill and Stroke dialog (Object menu). But after using Trace Bitmap, your pen strokes are not like Inkscape strokes or stroked paths. The Tweak tool is indeed the best way to adjust what were your original pen strokes. If it's just a tweak here and there, you'll probably be fine. But in my experience, using the tweak tool a lot ends up adding a lot more nodes, which if you have a lot of tweaking to do, could slow down Inkscape's performance.

If that happens, you could try using Path menu > Simplify, which will reduce the number of nodes without deforming the paths much. However, it will deform them slightly.

If that's unacceptable, try selecting your image (after tracing) with the Node tool, and you can see the structure of your image. Basically you have 2 paths, which ultimately are closed, which allows them to be filled with (presumably) black, and forming your original pen strokes. It might take longer, but if you find that you need to reduce the number of nodes, node editing might be a better solution than using the Tweak tool.

Both prkos' and my signatures contain links to instructional materials