What Is The Ideal Set Of Dice For 3e/Pathfinder/4e?

[Orius]

There is only one correct answer - you can never have enough dice.

For practical purposes, I generally use this assortment:

1d20: generally no more are needed than this.
1d12: not used often, so don't need a lot
2d10: a regular d10 and a percentile d10. Played with too many gamers who "forgot" to declare which d10 was the tens place until after the roll to not use a percentile d10. This could be upped to 3d10 for occasions where a 2d10 might be needed.
2d8: sometimes 2 are needed.
4d6: used for ability score generation, also these are common dice, so there's plenty of extras.
3d4: normally I'd just stick with 2d4, but I have another d4 I like a lot so I use 3.
1d3: have a d6 that's just numbered 1-3 so I use it for d3 rolls.

Possibly I'd use more dice if I needed them for spells, but that set is a general all-purpose one.

 

[prosfilaes]

1d20: generally no more are needed than this.

Except that then you don't have a backup if your d20 turns on you.

 

[Holy Bovine]

40 d6's, in case someone wants to play Shadowrun at some point.

Shouldn't you at least get enough d6s for one player then?


For myself, playing both 3E and 4E, I usually had 4 "standard" sets of 6 dice per character (sometimes I would be asked to run the PC of player who couldn't make it to the game for some reason). So this worked out to exactly 4 of every die. granted I rarely ever needed 4d12 but I almost always need most everything else. Also if you get different colours you can roll multiple attacks & damage all at once (I love rolling big fistfuls of dice!).

Also the One True Dice Set is this. Granted it has the extra d10 but I usually set them aside.