It is perfectly possible to start running games with a free account, even easier to start playing them. Everyone gets access to the Virtual Table Top, the character sheets, and even some basic tokens in the free package, what you might find you miss out on are maps, but if you check out the market place sections you might find some adventures for free that you can run. If you want to run D&D 5th Ed the basic rules compendium is included, it is very limitied but if you have the books in other formats there is nothing to stop you filling things in manually, it is just a little more work For other games there are plenty of character sheets that the user base have created, some of which are extremely professional. There is a voice and video chat option included, but many groups prefer to use Discord, which again is free to sign up to. However in my mind the most valuable thing that comes for free here is the help on offer from the forum regulars. So my suggestion to you is to decide on a game, create it and while you do check out the character sheet selection to get the sheet you like, there are a few games that don't have sheets available but the list of ones you can use is long, get your friends to creat accounts and then all jump in and see how it goes. Finally don't be scared to ask qestions, and try not to feel overwhelmed by the whole thing, you can start off very simply using it as little more than character sheet storage and possibly for maps just as you would around the table, and then expand what you can do as you become more familier with the system.
