I think part of Why the “entrance” moves work for both the Savvyhead and the Faceless is the built-in weirdness of the moves and the playbooks they belong to.
Like, of course the Savvyhead just shows up… that guy is always underfoot. And of course the Faceless shows up when things get bloody. That’s where she does.
If someone has a move like that in my game then I’ll pay closer attention to the issue than I would otherwise. I’ll make sure other people aren’t getting the benefit for free.
Also, in any game I’ll pay attention to gross differences in location. You’re on the island and they’re on the mainland, so no you can’t join the scene. Unless you have bonefeel.
It’s one of those things that’s frequently not needed at all - but when it is, it makes a big difference.
Oh yeah, for me the moves have never really been invalidated because, for the Apocalypse World ones anyway, I see them as honest-to-goodness powers. In one game the Hocus was being held at gunpoint by a hardholder in the middle of a scrap between their followers, and the Faceless was just behind him all of a sudden. It’s not, “It’s appropriate for you to be there.” It’s, “There is no way on heaven and earth that you could possibly be here right now and yet there you are barreling into the middle of it with a big axe and a bad attitude.”
I struggled with this with Night Witches. I wanted players to be able to aid one another during missions, but I didn’t want to categorize how that would happen. My solution was the Vedomaya move, which allows every plane to watch over another plane, which they historically did. When you are Vedomaya, you can take on a consequence of failure or partial success for your wing-mate. In play this leaves all the causality and fictional positioning to the players. How exactly do you take the Harm pointed at them? How exactly do you get your plane damaged instead of theirs? Why are you Marked instead of them? It foregrounds self-sacrifice and camaraderie, it adds a satisfying tactical nuance (who you Vedomaya for matters), and it encourages player creativity at night, which can become a series of tense die rolls without any roleplaying if you aren’t careful.
I’ve seen the Move “Have Sword, Will Travel” pop up in two Hearts of Wulin games - and both times, they worked pretty well, getting the character in question somewhere they shouldn’t have been, really. But then, HoW character tend not to hang around each other constantly.
Also, we had the situation that a character with this move was imprisoned by our enemies, and it was pretty clear that this Move might be used to escape without much explanation.
If I were running a HoW game I would probably lean against letting the move help someone get out of imprisonment or capture - unless in so doing they were going to have real impact on the other scene.
That would be my immediate reaction as well, but why, really? If the player uses the move to escape imprisonment, they’re telling you that they don’t like that their character is imprisoned and would prefer a more active role in the game.
So I think I’d let them.