Paizo Inc. Names Industry Veteran Christian Moore as First Chief Growth Officer

Paizo Inc. today announced the appointment of Christian Moore as its first chief growth officer (CGO). In this newly created role, he will be responsible for driving worldwide revenue growth through his management of the sales, ecommerce, marketing, and licensing teams.

A data-first brand architect with more than 25 years’ experience combining creativity with analytical rigor, Moore most recently served as Managing Director at Exemplar Holdings, where he drove consistent 19 percent year-over-year growth across the firm’s portfolio. He began his career in gaming, founding Last Unicorn Games and selling it to Wizards of the Coast, later becoming Wizards’ inaugural d20 Games Creative Director and VP of Product Development at Decipher.

Beyond gaming, he has held C-suite, ownership, and advisory roles for brands in entertainment, consumer goods, healthcare, and technology. Under Moore’s leadership, Paizo will lead analytics‑driven initiatives to enhance the player experience and deepen one-to-one engagement with the brands.

“Christian blends lifelong tabletop DNA with deep insights for growing brands like ours,” said Jim Butler, CEO of Paizo Inc. “His ability to unite creative vision with analytical discipline will help us reach new players and unlock fresh opportunities for Pathfinder®, Starfinder®, and worlds yet to come.”

As CGO, Moore will also spearhead Paizo’s core growth engines—encompassing digital marketing, hobby and book trade sales, consumer insights, licensing, ecommerce, and strategic partnerships—driving the company’s push into new platforms, regions, and opportunities.

“Paizo’s commitment to community and creativity resonates deeply with me,” Moore remarked. “I’m excited to pair the team’s storytelling genius with insight-led growth strategies and analytics as we continue to delight current fans while welcoming the next generation of adventurers.”

Moore holds an M.B.A. from Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis, an M.S. in Integrated Marketing Communications from Northwestern University, and a B.A. in literature from Princeton University.

Together, Moore and Paizo seek to blend analytics and artistry to broaden reach, deepen community bonds, and enrich player experiences on every platform.

 

[Staffan]

I want to like it, but it just went too 4E for me. I will give them credit, they did it in a way that didn't slaughter all the D&D sacred cows the way 4E did, but I still cant help but feel that vibe from it.

The way I see it is that the problems of the 3e engine hadn't changed appreciably in the 10 or so years between the release of 4e and the release of PF2. It's no great surprise that the solutions to those problems would look fairly similar as well, even if they aren't identical.

That said, I think there are some things from 4e that are missing in PF2:

• Attrition mechanic for medium-term healing (e.g. healing surges). Treat Wounds is a fairly dull mechanic because the only cost to using it is time, and at low levels (before you can take the skill feats that improve it) that time is very long (one-hour cooldown per target). And given how chonky PF2 monsters are, you don't want to go into combat at less than full hp.
• Resource-using martial characters. PF2 has a fairly strict delineation between proper casters and martial characters, and has issues with classes that straddle the line (e.g. alchemists). There are some martials with focus spells (mainly monks and champions), but those are unquestionably still spells and not limited-use techniques. Martials almost exclusively use action economy as a balancing mechanic rather than resource use. I am slightly hopeful that with kineticists blurring the line in one direction (unlimited-use magic effects), they might eventually blur the line in the other (limited-use martial techniques).
• Rituals as the primary means of using non-combat magic. 4e relegated pretty much all non-combat (or at least non-immediate-use) magic to rituals, and made them theoretically usable by anyone with an investment in a single feat (and a variety of skills). So things like animal messenger, comprehend languages, or magic to remove various long-term conditions were all rituals instead of spells. That meant that they weren't limited by class (so you wouldn't go "We need a cleric to deal with poisons"), you didn't need to choose between having those and having combat powers available, and since rituals took a fair bit of time to use (10+ minutes), they wouldn't outcompete using skills to solve problems. PF2 has rituals, but they don't fill the same niche as 4e rituals.

 

[Gambit42]

All of those I would say were going down the same path "in a way that didn't slaughter all the D&D sacred cows", especially the last two.

But ultimately, I didn't want a new take on 4E, I wanted a better 5E, just as PF1 was a better 3.5. But I have also come to realize that strict balance is not a huge priority for me in RPGs, at least not at the expense of fun. As long as all the players feel useful, that's what matters most. I also started in 2E AD&D and consider it to still be my overall favorite...I wish Myth & Magic hadn't turned out to be a total shitshow.

 

[Morrus]

But ultimately, I didn't want a new take on 4E, I wanted a better 5E, just as PF1 was a better 3.5.

Pretty much everybody and everyone has released their 'better' 5E. I'm not sure we need more of them!

 

[payn]

I was hoping for more 3.5 with bounded accuracy myself. PF2 ended up being a veiled encounters game as opposed to traditional attrition. I get why folks like it though. It flies under the radar in ways 4E didnt.

Even though PF2 is not for me, I think it was a good decision as it differentiates PF from D&D.

 

[MichaelSomething]

I was hoping for more 3.5 with bounded accuracy myself. PF2 ended up being a veiled encounters game as opposed to traditional attrition. I get why folks like it though. It flies under the radar in ways 4E didnt.

Even though PF2 is not for me, I think it was a good decision as it differentiates PF from D&D.

It feels like tons of people don't know how or what attrition is. It's five minute adventuring days or DMs complaining about overpowered PCs while not throwing 7ish encounters at them.

 

[payn]

It feels like tons of people don't know how or what attrition is. It's five minute adventuring days or DMs complaining about overpowered PCs while not throwing 7ish encounters at them.

If folks think that, they are not fit to hang with the best of EN Worlds incredible GMs and players. Folks who understand that 7 plus encounters is a byproduct of 5E straddling the line between an encounters based game and one with adventure day attrition.

 

[Staffan]

It feels like tons of people don't know how or what attrition is. It's five minute adventuring days or DMs complaining about overpowered PCs while not throwing 7ish encounters at them.

That's because fully attrition-based games are dull. Individual encounters often don't pose a challenge, because their job is to wear you down a little so the fourth or seventh or tenth encounter actually becomes dangerous. That's why healing surges in 4e was such a genius move – they allowed you to have combats that actually felt dangerous (because enemies actually had a chance of taking you out), but then let you heal back to full between fights (so you can have another dangerous-feeling fight), and still had an attrition thing going because the surges themselves were limited.

This is as opposed to 3e and 5e, where the hp you have are what you got, with healing magic supplementing them. This requires the party to have someone with the ability to heal. 5e supplements this somewhat with Hit Dice, but those are much more limited than 4e's healing surges (~100% of your max hp in "reserve healing", and accessing them takes an hour, as opposed to ~150% to 250%, and accessing them takes 5 minutes). In 3e, of course, the attrition model was broken from the start as soon as someone figured out wands of cure light wounds.

Pathfinder 2 is a bit odd in this regard. At first glance, it seems more like 3e, although with stronger healing magic (particularly at higher levels – low-level healing feels a little weak on account of the extra hp from ancestry). But then you have Treat Wounds, which lets you heal between fights using no resource at all other than time (10 min per target with a target-based 1 hour cooldown; skill feats exist that let you treat multiple targets at once or reduce the cooldown to 10 min which runs simultaneously with the actual time to use the skill). You also have focus spells for many casters, which they recover between fights.

 

[Gambit42]

Pretty much everybody and everyone has released their 'better' 5E. I'm not sure we need more of them!

Lol, fair enough good sir. Paizo wouldnt have done it, but I would still love to see my ideal 5E alternate, with is essentially 5E mixed with 2E. Classical spellcasting, more traditional numbers/bonuses to hit, and sleeping for the night only restores a bit of HP.

 

[Zardnaar]

Lol, fair enough good sir. Paizo wouldnt have done it, but I would still love to see my ideal 5E alternate, with is essentially 5E mixed with 2E. Classical spellcasting, more traditional numbers/bonuses to hit, and sleeping for the night only restores a bit of HP.

I've thought of something similar.

Take 5E, rewrite the classes and 3.5 levels of healing overnight ( 1/hp per level iirc).

 

[Incenjucar]

I want to like it, but it just went too 4E for me. I will give them credit, they did it in a way that didn't slaughter all the D&D sacred cows the way 4E did, but I still cant help but feel that vibe from it.

To each their own! It plays much faster than 4E while avoiding the rocket tag of 3E while giving you a ton of things you can do each turn. You also have less rigidly defined class roles than 5E, with more player-chosen options vs. kit options.

I find it quite fun being able to be a magic-user tank who can wrestle giants and snipe goblins with flying anchors from 100' away from behind a rock shaped like a middle finger that I conjured.