Unfortunately, it sounds like Pellet is dead, so you won't get to make him squirm about his little brother.

Pellet isn't dead. He's getting bed rest, supervised by the loving Brainer, after the PCs realized that they'd forgotten about him for a day after locking him in a dark closet with a gunshot wound to the leg without medical treatment. Our hardholder said "Oh, we'll send a medic after we question him" and then got distracted after questioning and forgot...

The info that Burroughs the Brainer pulled was that Pellet has some severe issues with dark and confined spaces so Mr. Toughguy didn't do so well with his seeping, infected wound lying bound in the dark without food or water for a day or so. :-)

My PC group for which I'm MC has a Brainer, Burroughs. Both the player and I have been having some issues with the effectiveness of his Deep Brain Scan.

Per the rule book on the move:

Deep brain scan: when you have time and physical intimacy with someone — mutual intimacy like holding them in your arms, or 1-sided intimacy like they’re restrained to a table — you can read them more deeply than normal. Roll+weird. On a 10+, hold 3. On a 7–9, hold 1. While you’re reading them, spend your hold to ask their player questions, 1 for 1:

• what was your character’s lowest moment?
• for what does your character crave forgiveness, and of whom?
• what are your character’s secret pains?
• in what ways are your character’s mind and soul vulnerable?

On a miss, you inflict 1-harm (ap) upon your subject, to no benefit.

The PCs had a prisoner, Pellet, from a gang of gun runners. Burroughs uses the Violation Glove to do a brain scan and asks for Pellet's lowest moment.

Scrabbling, since this is an NPC that just acquired a name, we go into some details of Pellet's childhood and his bullying of hit little (possibly mutated) brother and how horrible Pellet feels about it now.

All fine and good but, as Burroughs realizes, not terribly fucking useless when Burroughs really wants to track down Pellet's buddies who have large firearms and an RPG in a truck.

This has happened a couple of times with the brain scan now. It has wound up being useful for character development but tactically kind of useless.

I'm wondering if this is normal or if there is something I'm missing here in how to handle this.

To put it another way, he does all this work trying to sneak up, to avoid getting shot... he works his way up, finally gets there, sneaks around the outside of the structure, trying to decide how he's going to get in and sneak up on a gunman...and then I go, "Oh, he's gone. Nothing there. Sorry"?

Sounds like bad gamemastering to me. Not fun for the people playing.

In your case with the sniper I would have told the PC, "You are traipsing along and get the hideous sensation that you are being watched, in that moment you feel the threat of imminent doom as a large-caliber rifle fires in the distance.  -Roll to Act Under Fire."
On a hit they drop prone, 10+ they take no Harm, 7-9, they might take some harm. On a miss you make your hard move. Either way they now realize a sniper is firing at them.

Anyway, that's how I would do it. I use Act Under Fire for reacting to a threat, ambush, or trap. I have them roll it "as it's happening". It's happening RIGHT NOW. If there is reason for them to Read a Sitch first and they do so, that's cool. Like if they know they are walking into a mine field. But if they don't, I use Act Under Fire as a kind of 'saving throw' to save as much skin as they can.

That makes a lot of sense to me.

I have a side game play question that is kind of unrelated except in being an issue of being a n00b MC here.

After the sniper fired, I had another PC, Jess the Saavyhead, who heard the shot, rush into the area to help.

Jess managed to get shot (I gave 1 harm from a long range hit) and started working through cover (acting under fire) to get close to the sniper. Jess took long enough doing that and bungled a role later, that I basically decided the sniper saw Jess and figured the jig was up, bugging out. Jess had read the sitch earlier when shot and figured out the location of the sniper while shooting (per the questions in the AW rulebook) and, when Jess got to near the location, read the sitch again to try to figure out whether to throw in a grenade through a window or come in shooting through a different door.

Of course, my sniper had bugged out already so then I had a conflict with a player where they said, "I roll a 7 and read the sitch. The question is the true location of the enemy inside the structure" and I said "Well, you don't think anyone is in there." We then had a minor disagreement about whether I was violating the spirit of the rules by not telling him where the sniper was after he'd made a roll.

My justification as MC was:

a) I didn't want him to know where the sniper was yet because it would cause the scene to end (they didn't know who the sniper was and I wanted it to play out a bit as part of a Front).

b) The sniper was gone so I don't care if you made a roll to identify where they are in a place that they've already left.

I'm a newish AW MC. I've been running a game recently (we've had four sessions, I believe) and we're all new to AW. So, we've definitely not quite grok'd all of the gameplay versus other RPGs (we're all late 30-something to 40-something old hands).

As MC, a question came to me last night during a game. We had the hardholder, Colonel M'Beke, wandering across his hardhold and I decided to have a sniper from one of the fronts take a potshot at him.

In most games, I'd give M'Beke a chance to make some sort of perception check, as a kind of passive skill mechanic, to see if he knew anything is up. Me, as MC, telling M'Beke to read the sitch didn't seem write because that is an active move on his part but I couldn't think of any moves that are really passive. The players and their characters always do things to see what happens, which means they have a certain agency. They decide to do thing or something happens and they respond. It is always an active decision on their part.

So, the question is how would I resolve this desire to give M'Beke a chance to notice the sniper before he fires?

What I wound up actually doing is deciding that I didn't feel a driving need to give M'Beke two harm (he's already walking wounded from another fight) in order to have him notice, "Oh hey, there's a sniper!", when the bullet hits him. I had the shot miss but hit nearby and then M'Beke read the sitch, made a weak success and realized where the shot had come from. He then decided to move under fire to dive for some cover.

As a side issue, the fact that I, as MC, don't ever roll for NPCs still weird me out. I wind up in this situation where I simply have to decide whether an NPC harms a player or not in combat, for example. After a few decades of gaming, this feels very strange since I've always played in systems where NPCs have to make rolls too!