I wasn't sure what forum to share this in but I wanted to catalogue the tools I'm finding may actually be working for me playing at distance.

Discord - We are using this for the video chat and for a shared die rolling channel.  Many people are using Zoom but there are some extra features that I like and I find are actually a little more "bang for the buck" over what a zoom call does.  Link to Discord

EDIT:  Zoom - Okay so after a lot of playing with it, Zoom wins.  Yes, in Discord Video chat I can balance each person individually on the call.  Only with Zoom I find I don't NEED to do that nearly as often.  Plus, unlike Discord, I can change the positions easily of people in the zoom call.  From a streaming point of view it is WAY easier to get everyone into their correct windows on the overlay.  For me, Discord lost this fight, Zoom won.

DnDBeyond - Obviously this is the go to for character sheets and character tracking.  I don't need to sell it here but I will point out a few things we do use, specifically the onboard dice rolling.  A small protip:  Turn on your hardware acceleration.  Oddly some browsers have that off by default.

Digital Dice for Discord - This Google plugin links your DNDBeyond rolls to a discord server.  It takes a LITTLE set up but not so much that we didn't have the whole party using it within half an hour.  The result is that when someone clicks on a check on their character sheet or rolls a die on DNDBeyond, it sends the results to the discord channel.  While I like the Avrae bot for discord, it's a set of commands to learn that can distract from the game.  This was a big change for me because it managed to capture the "how'd you do?" of looking around the table that we lose when we're at a distance.  I do think there's some value in that shared moment of seeing the natural 20 instead of just having someone say it.  Link to Digital Dice for Discord

EDIT:  I've stopped using Digital Dice.  It's another plugin we don't need now that DnD Beyond supports campaign dice rolling and viewing.  With that feature we can all see the dice hitting the table without the extra set up and windows needed to run a dice roller on Discord.  DND Beyond again for the win.

Roll Dice with Friends - A snazzy little website that does the same but I don't use it for the players; I use it only for my own dice when I need to toss dice not available through other tools.  It does offer the space for players to create "Rooms" to share dice with each other and collectively roll.  Link to Roll Dice with Friends

Improved Initiative Tracker - this is one tool that I'm going to keep using when this is "all over".  It allows you to preload player characters, as well as NPC's and monsters.  The library is prefilled with templates from the SRD that can be edited easily.  It also has a built in dice roller that includes simple scripting for bonuses and damage dice to be attached to the character/ monster in the tracker.  There is also a pop out "player view" that shows the initiative number, and relative health of the monsters so they can see the outcomes on their own.  What really sold me on it is that when you make a damage roll, it 'holds' that result so when you click on a PC's health, it is able to just queue up that value by default first (which is then easily over-ridden).  If you're doing a lot of homebrew monsters there is a bit of work to set them up, but it pays off later.  Link to Improved Initiative

Miro White Board - I started using this just as a digital white board I could writing on while I'm teaching.  In using it I found that it's free features include the ability to share your white board with a team.  Now on the free version, once you create a share link, anyone with it can get at it, so be careful with it (or plan to make a new board).  You are limited, free, to three different boards at a time.  It's clean and easy to use and works really well if you also have pen tablet.  Link to Miro Digital White Board

EDIT:  While Miro has more functions and better overall use-ability, it's relatively invasive nature eventually soured us to it.  It's good, and interactive and has a lot of great features but we have migrated over to Google Jam Board for our games.  The Copy/Paste of tokens isn't quite as powerful, and you can't "move" drawings on it.  You can move dropped items such as token graphics and that's pretty good.  Link to Google Jamboard

Hopefully you all find these useful.

These are great tips, thank you for sharing! I want to share something I've found helpful in my distanced gaming as well. 

Both in the game I DM and the one I play in we use google draw as our combat maps as it's gridded and you can add labelled shapes. I've gone a step beyond that though with my game and follow a lot of TTRPG map makers and have downloaded their combat maps and put the ones into google draw that fit the dimensions. It looks super cool and you can have customizable shapes for players and monsters. I also like it because you can put outlines on the shapes in different colors to signify conditions that a PC or monster might have. I find it easy to track and the players love it because you don't have to just imagine the fight with no visual reference and not everyone wants to have subscriptions to multiple websites just to access and create maps.  I would recommend checking out Czepeku Maps, 2 minute tabletop, battlemap reddit, Fantasy Atlas, Tehox Maps, and Neutral Party Maps. These are awesome creators who do an incredible job. 

We also utilize text chat features in whatever video chat platform we use so that if the players or DM wants to communicate secret info to each other they can have a private chat! It's so much easier than having everyone leave the table/ go on mute for a bit. These are just some tips I've found useful as well. 

Has anyone ever used tabletop simulator to play?

I've seen videos on youtube about it, but I still feel like it could be too complicated 

I'd like to throw in a tool here - Avrae works wonders for discord DnD, and my players love looking up things at the drop of a hat.

We usually combine Avrae with Roll20, for grid combat scenarios, as all players didnt want to import their dnd beyond sheet into Roll20 (lots of manual work which is understandable.)

Quote from Gazza_Ladra >>

Has anyone ever used tabletop simulator to play?

I've seen videos on youtube about it, but I still feel like it could be too complicated 

 So Table Top Simulator is good for what it is but that's a thing that is not designed around Dungeons and Dragons specifically.  It really just a very mod-able physics engine with some game tracking elements and now with an internal scripting engine.  It looks pretty as all get out.  So if you can build/ import your maps (and trees and walls) you can get a really neat visual of the table with everyone's minis and you can do a lot with tokens and trackers to keep track of things as you play.

But you either need to find the right mod in the workshop or you need to write one to fully leverage the full power of it.  And it's a bit of a beast if you have players with older computers.

I hosted a virtual game of Camp Grizzly for a virtual con using it and Zoom and it worked pretty well but it has its downsides if you don't have people who can run the software.  I've heard good things about the Foundry though as an alternative but powerful virtual table top like Roll20 but with a bit more "bite" to it.

Roll20 for VTT

Dndbeyond for character sheet

Beyond 20 plugin to export the dice rolls from dndbeyond to Roll20

Discord for voice chat and various art/chat/occ