I had a cacophony of suggestions come from every direction. In addition to my research (great article here), I found that I wasn't doing anything groundbreaking. I'm no pioneer (in fact, I'm known as a "late-adopter" or "laggart" in marketing terms), so seeing that other people had the same thoughts years ago was helpful. Those suggestions and my research narrowed everything down to three main options:
1. Discord- everyone suggested Discord as a great site to run voice-chat and even store some documents for people. But this was too generic for me and wasn't what I was looking for. If you're playing some video games, then this is definitely the site. But role-playing? Not so much.
2. Roll 20- This program is awesome! In fact, it's specifically made to create that virtual environment for people to role-play in. It contains all kinds of graphic interfaces and tools to be able to show all players where their characters, foes and stashes are in well-designed rooms. But it still didn't have that thing that I'm wanting...
3. Zoom- This video-conferencing program allows for people to speak to each other and, most importantly, see each other face-to-face. This is what I want in a game. I've been a DM since the late 80's and I have outstanding storytelling skills (yes, I even do voices). This means I don't need the visuals of Roll20 to immerse the characters. However, I still need the face-to-face ability and video-conferencing turns out to be the only way to accomplish this.
Now, I am BY NO MEANS promoting Zoom to people. I am not paid by them, nor do I work for the company. But I'm an instructor and this is the program that I use and am familiar with. In fact, I play Star Wars Armada over this program with a buddy from New York (I'm a good 'ol Texan, so a bit far away to get together) and it works great! Plus, we have certain tools such as setting up a 'virtual background' and changing profile picture (although I've forgotten how to do that recently), which can be very useful in the game. This platform meets my needs specifically and that's what I needed (see what I did there?).
Being a D&D player since the old days of yellow-bound 1st edition and trying to capture that same imagination-based concept in today's video-driven society is often difficult. I've already had two other potential gamers decline joining my group because they "don't have the imagination" (something I can't understand, but I also didn't think there were people without an internal voice, so...). My skills as a storyteller come from decades of narration-to-immersion and my love of video games is limited because of that. Luckily, it's often the tools you use for unrelated activities that can be the most useful (who thought pipe-cleaners could be used for making animals in kindergarten?).
Let me know if you've found some esoteric answers to interesting problems like this in your gaming life. Have you used real-life programs or tools to aid your gaming adventures? I'd LOVE to hear your suggestions and stories below. Until next post- Happy Gaming!