I'd say they're appropriate in any situation where the PCs are at a loss for what to do or aren't hellbent on pursuing some goal. 

Normally I imagine you'll have characters busy doing things that you want to play out, which prevents you from fast-forwarding their life.  It's when the momentum founders due to a long break or something that that kind of "montage" is appropriate. 

Well, Fnord, if you wanted to cite rules, Perfect Instincts means that (some) battlebabes have a hefty incentive to spend more time planning their move than gunluggers do.  That said, I personally would play up the instinctual, intuitive aspect of that, and assume that the the character exectues with unhesitating grace what took the player a good deal of thinking to gin up. 

Addendum: sometimes people roll more than +3 due to being in a car, or reading a situation, or having insight.  

If someone is +4 or more, don't help them.  Just don't do it.  (Unless they desperately need to hit 12 or something).  

If someone has +5, you need +3 Hx to reasonably interfere with them.  If they're rolling +6, you have nothing to gain.  If he's rolling +7, well... he can't miss even with your interference.  So don't fight an insano driver with perfect instincts.  It won't end well.   

This post is not a complaint; it is an attempt to draw attention to a rather quirky effect of the rules.  The effect produced is in fact very much in genre, but it's one players should be aware of when choosing their moves, and MCs should be careful of when planning theirs. 

When you try to help someone, you give a bonus to their roll as long as you roll a 7+, which is pretty easy, right?  But if you outright miss, the MC gets to make a hard move.  And sometimes, those moves aren't good for the person you're helping.  let's look at an example from the book:

Marie’s helping Keeler get into the water cult house by talking
animatedly with Tum Tum, trying to hold their attention while
Keeler sneaks behind them. (On a 7–9, maybe Tum Tum start
pressing her for … unsavory commitments, with threats to back
them up.) Marie misses the roll, so I get to make as hard a move
as I like. I choose to put Keeler in a spot. “Do you glance Keeler’s
way? Or do they read your mind? Or what? Anyway, one of them
turns, very deliberately, and Keeler, looks right at you. What do
you do?”

In this case what I believe is going on is that Keeler is acting under fire, rolling +cool to sneak into the building, and Marie is rolling +Hx to help.  When Marie misses her help roll, the MC responded by causing Keeler to automatically fail her own move.  We could generalize this as an application of "turn their move back on them" -- a missed attempt to help can cause the main effort to fail.  That certainly keeps AW feeling real--wannabe helpers ruin 4.7 projects, according to the Department of Fanciful statistics.  But it means that there's a trade-off and a balance point: a rolled help move can make the main move more or less likely to succeed. That means that a helper with a low +Hx can actually make you less likely to succeed than going it alone.

Now, AW characters are *supposed* to act rashly and self-destructively from time to time, so there's nothing wrong with the existence of a well-meaning move that actually screws your friends.  But what might surprise you is just how hard actually helping is.  I've crunched the numbers, and it turns out that the answer is this:

If you assume that missing your help roll causes the overall effort to fail or become irrelevant, then

IF you have +3Hx AND the person you are helping is rolling +1 or less, THEN you increase their chance of hitting; ELSE you make no difference or are an active hindrance. 

Now maybe you're fine with that, but I'm a big believer in player transparency, so I would implore you to make sure your players know this fact.  They can still choose to "help" when the fiction demands it, but they should know how the dice fall.  But, maybe your vision of AW is one where teamwork is more beneficial.  In that case, here is my advice:

--remember that to do it, you have to do it.  You could, when answering a read situation or offering an opportunity, decree that some things can't be done without help.  Marie rolling +Hx hurts Keeler if it's *optional*, but maybe Keeler can't even try to sneak in without Marie creating a distraction.  If you do it, you do it, so Marie has to roll.  Besides the difficulty in getting two PCs together, this move ends up being less likely to succeed for other moves, so try to make sure the payoff is worth it

AND (the big one)

--be judicious about how hard you go with the move you get on a failed help.  Try to put the burden of failure on the helper, not the helpee, and even then go a little softer than you might.  Share with your players your intentions Re: failed help rolls. 

PS-- the same thing applies to interference in principle, but interference is *way* easier since it gives a -2 when you hit.  And, while occasionally failing to interfere might help, it usually wouldn't.  Still, if you consider missing to be equally bad as making him miss is good, check this out:

IF you have +3 Hx THEN you are more more likely to cause him to miss than to miss yourself

IF you have +2 Hx AND your victim has -1 or better THEN you are more liekly to cause a miss than to miss

IF you have +1 Hx AND your victim has +1 or +2, THEN you are mroe likely to cause a miss than to miss yourself.

ELSE you are more likely to miss than to cause a miss. 

Only the Skinner has the option to pick up followers as an improvement, even though acquiring insight (or madness) and starting a cult seems like a pretty natural character arc.  I'm especially surprised it's not an option for Angels, considering the deep associations between religion and medicine, and the psychic/empathic powers an Angel can get.  A Brainer, too, would make a scary-ass cult leader with Unnatural Lust Transfixion. 

Are they omitted just because those playbooks ran out of advancement slots?  Or because Insight and Augury are too big a deal to give out easily?  Would there be any reason not to let a player substitute one leadership improvement for another?  It's not a big problem for me in any event, since by the time you played through your prophet's awakening and proselytizing, you'd probably hit Ungiven Future and be able to straight up change books to Hocus. 

PS: also curious why Battlebabe gets Leadership rather than Pack Alpha.   

So, don't take it.  Starting with Breathtaking and Artful/Gracious makes perfect sense.  After that, well, it gets a little weird, literally.  You either have to pick up Lost and Hypnotic or ignore the "new skinner move" options.  (Though hypnotic music makes sense to me).  If you don't like that psychic angel, your best best bet is to take all the +1stats and change type to Operator as soon as you hit ungiven future. 

So, if you aren't going to support Player on player combat especially thoroughly, it would seem that you want to avoid "fiddly" kung fu rules.  Looking at the Crane Style example, choosing between 1 damage and ap, for instance, is a lot more effort than I think a fight with NPCs usually merits.  Unless you're introducing more powerful armor, the AP option is only relevant when they have armor-2, and honestly with +1harm you can probably take a guy out in one shot anyway. 

I'd start by thinking of scenes where Wuxia heroes fight and ask myself "what was accomplished here?"  Then I'd ask myself which are the fiction and which need to be moves

--an army/gang is defeated by a martial artist
--an artist wins a fight without taking harm
--a patron or crowd in impressed by the artist's virtuosity
--a master agrees to train a student, or acknowledges that the student's training is done
--something exotic happens to the artist's victims. 

Off the top of my head, I think "a master agrees to take you" could be part of the fiction, or treated as a special manipulate roll.  Add a new tag, "Connoisseur:Stat".  A character with Connoisseur: Strategy can be manipulated with+strategy, one with Connoisseur:Wisdom with +wisdom and so on. 

Taking out armies calls for something like NTBFW, Avoiding harm needs its own move, and impressing the audience could be based on Skinner moves and/or on Moonlighting (try to find a patron to support you with "gigs" like acrobatics or calligraphy)

Finally, I would avoid going crazy with special attacks.  It seems to me that, broadly speaking, there are two types of special kung fu attacks.  One leaves people alive but incapacitated in some way (like the paralyzing nerve strikes, or breaking the opponent's chi), the other gives them some progressive problem that can be used to manipulate them (they are poisoned, or you now control their life force or whatever.

I'd simply make a basic rule that PCs can always inflict nonlethal harm, allow them to specify types of harm with seize/go aggro ("I want him be unable to fight/I want to break his leg), and introduce a new move that allows the PC to "suspend" harm they would otherwise inflict. 

These are just my thoughts looking over what's here so far...

FigureFour,

What I'm curious about is what you did with that pile of advances.  Your Gunlugger, for instance, "pretty much ran out of advancement options".  Does that include the crew, the gang, and the hardhold?  If so, how did the other players react to the introduction of all these extra characters?  Or did the MC use NPCs you guys already knew and loved (or loved to hate) for the gang members and hold citizens?