OK, so here I hope to collect notes on how to use Metacreator to best effect after some hard-earned lessons.

Finalize Characters

Before advancing a character, make sure the character has been Finalized. This marks the character as completed and established, rather than still undergoing creation.

Seasonal Advancement

Make sure to keep the character Information and History windows open while advancing them. The former will show you what Season and Year your character has been advanced to, so you can see if it fails to advance or something. The latter should show you every season of advancement since finalization.

Recall that most non-Magi characters get two seasons per year “free” to advance per various methods, while the other two are spent working (although Exposure experience can be earned at this time). The Wealthy Virtue and Poor Flaw add or remove 1 season from this total, respectively.

When a character spends a season working, I first select which Ability will get Exposure experience from this activity. Then I apply the Exposure experience. I do this first because adding Exposure does not advance the current Season. Then I advance the current Season by choosing Generic Activity. You should see the Season advance in the Information window.

All other activities should advance the Season, so there’s only one step in those cases. You select the Ability/Art to advance, select the appropriate advancement option, and again the advancement should be apparent in the Information and History windows.

Using the Covenant Library

Once your character has a covenant character file associated with it, you can use it to study from the library without entering the book’s data yourself. From the advancement section, choose Book, then [in progress]

File Names and Maintaining Character Copies

I highly recommend saving frequent copies of your characters in some kind of progressive fashion. It’s easy to screw things up in a way that’s not easy to recover, so I frequently save a copy of my character before advancement, in case it becomes necessary to just toss the changes and try again. That said, the covenant character file looks for a particular character file name, so when you make “backup” copies of your character in this fashion, do so with an eye towards keeping the newest iteration of your character with the same file name as the old one (e.g., if you save a backup copy you might call it CharacterOnDateX.chr and then advance it – and when satisfied, Save As the original name of Character.chr).