I wouldn't ever ask my friends to play this game. Don't be so cruel, they're FRIENDS... not family.
In all seriousness, this game has next to nothing going for it for new players. The new player experience is absolute dog **** and the devs have less than zero interest in looking into ways of resolving that. Sure you could argue "but I started pre-aos and there was LESS!" which would be wrong. Back then a naked character could still function at the most basic of things and fighting, once resists came into play that was no longer the case. And yet every character still starts naked with no resistances at all. The only time the devs have ever tried to remedy this is with the "Initiation" or whatever suits, which were still base leather armor resistances. Of course you could always give your friends decent starter suits for really no actual cost, but it still doesn't help that much. There is still a dependency on other people to get anything done for a new player, and the only way for them to break away from that is to create a functional chr, which means that they have to dedicate their time to training those skills, UO's character development really isn't ideally suited towards what most people are willing to do anymore, even with scripts to afk train. And this is only the very tiniest tip of the iceberg.
I would suggest looking into other games to play with non-UO friends.