[City of Heroes] I really like making level 6 characters. It is a great way to spend an evening. If you have not played City of Heroes, get a few friends and a few trial codes and give it a shot.
Get a team of three or four people together on Teamspeak or Ventrilo. You can get to level 5 or 6 in a couple of hours. Fire up Heroes or Villains, and each of you design whatever character you like. Almost all of them work well together. My SG has had fun making the same sort of character to try out, so one night we had three Fire/Fire Brutes and a Dark/Dark Brute rambling around.
Do your first contact worth of missions. Play, run, crash, whatever. You will get to level 5 or 6. In that time, there is no death penalty. You start out with two powers and will get to pick three more that night. You will level 5 times in a single evening and go through a small story or two in the missions. You will not need to worry about when folks will be on, what levels everyone is, or anything else that creates problems in forming teams: you are all the same level, and you need not see those characters after that night. You get to try something new. No grinding, no worries, just a bit of very fast play with lots of instant gratification.
And if you find that you really like one of them, congrats, you have someone new to take to higher levels. Try it out a few times, and you and all your friends will have some level 6 characters on that server. Now you can all decide what to play and try some of the other content together.
: Zubon
Too bad the fun of low level never translated so well in the higher end game.