My group uses a private Google+ community to organise the games, and G+ alongside Roll20 to play the games. We play entirely online on a weekly basis, mainly because we're all about the same age and have small children and families, so it's difficult to get together for a face to face game.
For D&D 5th Ed you're pretty spoiled for choice, but when it all boils down the best two options are this:
Roll20, either in conjunction with G+ or on it's own. You can create an account and run your campaign through it for free, and the biggest pro (in my opinion) was the ease of use when it integrates with G+. Most everyone has a google account these days, so they also have a G+ account whether they know it or not. Once you've created your game in Roll20, you can choose to launch it in a g+ hangout.
Once you've done that for the first time, whenever you launch a G+ hangout the Roll20 app will be present, and you can launch it and select your campaign from within the hangout. Running the game each week becomes as simple as scheduling a G+ hangout event and showing up - the players don't even need Roll20 accounts, they just click the hangout invite link and game on. The D&D 5e character sheet for Roll20 seems pretty excellent too, with some dice rolling automation built into it. We're taking it for a test run soon hopefully.
The other main option right now, though it can get pricy, is Fantasy Grounds. It's not as simple for the players as Roll20 (which is, as i've said, just a link click), but if they're willing to install the program (available on Steam now as well), Fantasy Grounds is now the official online tool for D&D 5th, in partnership with Wizards of the Coast. It has excellent integration with the rules system and character sheets, as well as supporting hero lab. Some friends of mine swear by it, though it is a bit more complicated to get set up and running.
Both solutions support full voice, and I know Roll20 supports full video both in the app itself and through hangouts, as well as an online tabletop for maps, images, handouts and whatever else you like. This made it a lot easier for us to retain that "social tabletop" feeling, despite playing entirely remote. Using a large enough screen and a good set of speakers and microphone, you could play partial remote (with only a few players remote) or even with everyone in the room and disabling the voice and video altogether if you wanted.
Either way, if you do plan on getting in to running your games online through virtual tabletops, Google+ is your friend! There is a massive community of people there who will be more than happy to lend any assistance required.
Personally, I run a community geared at assisting people to set up, run or find games in the asia-pacific time zones. You can find it here: https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/100566740249118526694
For other timezones, such as the American zones, a great place to start is here: https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/107422815813208456454 It's an excellent community filled with friendly people.
Going to post about my experiences as a web GM for several years now and try to answer your questions. 90% of my players have probably never heard my voice.
If you want to learn D&D or any other tabletop game, it's very easy to get started! If you are new to RPGs, I would recommend D&D 5th edition, which also offers a version of the rules and handbook for free. This should teach you anything you need to know to run a game. If you want to know more about D&D or any other game, consider buying their "Core Rulebook" or "Player's Handbook"; these are always in book or e-book format.
Basic Rules for Dungeons and Dragons
The rules will give you the mechanics to run combat, character building and handling situations, but a Role Playing Game like this doesn't quite play like the videogames. It requires 1 player to be the Game Master (GM/DM) that handles all the NPCs and story while the other players (preferably at least 3) become the Player Characters (PCs/Party members). It's completely free-form and your character can try to do anything you want, making it much more open/free/sandbox than any videogame that exists.
Remember that all RPGs do not run in real time, but in turns or some time abstraction. Even if you are slow at typing, the game 'pauses' so you can make your decision whenever it's relevant like it was a classic videogame RPG. The speed advantage of using verbal communication becomes moot in this context.
As far as playing online, there is a lot of software that can accomplish this. Most popular ones I've seen are Fantasy Grounds, MapTools and Roll20.net. Of those, my favorite for sure has been Roll20, which gives you all the resources to play an authentic game online without needing any player to download any software.
Though dialogue is extremely important in an RPG, it can be conveyed in text form perfectly. In a real life situation where you are together with your friends it would be extremely difficult to communicate without talking, but in an online environment such as Roll20, the norm is to do it by text. The major downside of playing by text is that it can become pretty slow since the player engagement is not as high as when playing Live.
You only really need 4 ways to communicate in these games:
- Talking as your Character or an NPC. The character is speaking in the game. It's the same as when a character in an old videogame talks in that you should expect to see the name and avatar of whoever is talking. This means the DM doesn't have to 'make voices' for the characters either (Which is good if you suck at it).
- Talking out of character. For all the stuff that is not role playing, like talking with GM, describing things to the group, making jokes or whatever else. It can still be very fun to chat with friends like this.
- Describing the actions of characters. RPGs are supposed to mostly be in your imagination. You can get tokens on the field to show everyone's relative positions, but actual action has to be described in words, It's easily done in text as if writing a book or screenplay.
- Visual Medium for Combat. Doing text-only combat with just text is really hard, since this often requires a lot of information exchanging betwen players and the GM. A visual medium like a grid on a map with tokens representing all the creatures can speed things up a lot. A picture is worth a thousand words, after all.
All 4 are very easy to accomplish in text form online as you can switch your chat name at will (to any character) and use emote formatting for showing what character is doing an action. They also provide ways to roll all of the dice you need very easily, store character sheets and handle maps for combat and scenery.
If you have an online group of friends, I'd recommend you organize them to play on one of these platforms. Only the DM (Usually most interested player who organizes things) should really need to learn the rules of the game before starting (The PCs can learn as they go). You should probably organize them using some other group chat tool such as Skype/Discord/Slack/Hangouts.
If you don't have a group of interested players, you can still learn the rules and try to find a group online in a forum or reddit, Roll20 also has a way to search for "open" games looking for players.
If you still have any questions, you are in the perfect site to have them answered.
Best Answer
I think your players don't lack the rules knowledge, they lack creative thinking. The signs of not enough rules knowledge is slow and or awkward play, caused by constantly having to look up rules for things your character is trying to do (jump, cast spells in melee, grapple).
As far as how much is really necessary: