So, I am an olllddd grognard so perhaps my experience is irrelevant, but I'll share it anyway.
When I had my introduction to FRP in the fall of 1974, we all sat around a table, rolled a bunch of dice (they were just dice back then, not D6) and wrote a bunch of numbers on index cards without having any idea what they represented and how they would effect us during gameplay. Then we spent hours buying equipment and filling up the cards with lists of spells and eventually watched Saturday Night Live and went to bed and started to actually play the game the next morning. It's a miracle any of us came back for a second session. Now, decades later my teenage son and his friends found my library of ancient RPG materials and expressed interest. My experience was largely AD&D and Dragonquest, but I had dabbled with RQ3 and thought it was far and away the best introductory rules set for novice players new to roleplaying. After all, if you understood percentages in middle school math you can comprehend the RQ system. How I handled the start was that I created characters for them. There were 6 players so I created 9 characters, all of which were compatible with the character generation rules in RQ3. Now the characteristics were probably slightly above the expected average, but none were way out of line power-wise. I made typical archtype characters - a big strong dumb farmboy with his father's sword, a snarky educated city girl with lots of magic ability but barely able to lift her silver spoon, typical dwarf and elf, and that aspiring druidess did have a 16 POW but also had a 7 APP (think of the role playing possibilities). I described the characters in general terms, let the players pick the ones they wanted and, oh by the way, instant balanced party, which the novices would not have known to do at the beginning. Only then when they had character record sheets in hand did we discuss characteristics or any other numbers. Half an hour of explaining the basics ("the red die is always the tens digit") and they were actually playing. Later, after they gained some experience at playing and had incurred some casualties it was time for two players to generate new characters. I had them roll up 3D6 seven times, but just record the numbers. If the sum of all the numbers was less then 75 they could reroll the lowest number until the sum reached 75. Then the players got to assign the numbers to characteristics as they saw fit. This let the players tailor the characters to their wishes, but avoided any fine tuning or supermen. Worked well for me. Anyone else ever try it?