House rule thoughts

So, I've been starting to think about what house rules I want to use in my campaign. I plan on using 2nd Edition rules, because they have a few tweaks from the 1st Edition rules I know and love, but not as much chaos as 3rd Edition. I thought about going with B/X rules for a while, since this is going to be a group of people who have never played ANY RPG before, much less D&D, but I'm more comfortable with AD&D, so that's what I'm sticking wth. Anyways, here's my thoughts...

1) first thing I want to do.... I'm thinking of taking the XP totals from all the various classes, adding them up for each level, and averaging them, so that I have one XP Level progression table, like they do in 3ed (which is one of exactly 3 things I liked in 3ed). Reasoning for this is because....

2) I'm thinking of getting rid of the multiclass hindrances, so players can take a level from any class, like in 3ed. That's what the unified XP tables would help. Here will of course be some restrictions (see below), but has anyone tried this with 2nd Ed? I don't want to rip the 3Ed XP table off totally, because I like that you need more XP for levels in 2nd Ed.

3) As starting classes, I am allowing Warrior, Mage, Cleric, or Rogue. Rangers, Paladins and Druids are allowable later on, but will be rare to encounter (and I may do some changes with them too... see later). Monks are ultra-rare, but could be allowed later. Since this is a group of first-timers, I'm keeping it simple off the start. Also, my monks are going to be a little different... all monks must be a deity of physical perfection. Monks are meant to be the pinnacle of human ability, and not seen as religious warriors... that's paladins.

4) I'm thinking of putting some restrictions in, to keep from having a character with 8 different classes. Here's what I'm thinking:
- if a character has any levels in classes other than cleric or warrior, they cannot select paladin levels. Conversely, once they select a level as a paladin, they may no longer select levels as a warrior. If they take a level in any class other than paladin or cleric after their first paladin level, they may never select a paladin level again.
- once a character selects a level as ranger, they may no longer take warrior levels. If they subsequently select a warrior lev el after taking a ranger level, they may no longe take ranger levels.
- once a character takes a level as a druid, they may only take further levels as druid or a ranger. If they take a level in any other class, they may no longer select druid levels.
- a character who wishes to take a level as a monk may only have levels in warrior or mage. Once they take a monk level, they may not take a level in anything other than monk, mage or warrior, or they may no longer selectt monk levels.
I know that is a lot of deatil, but we'll see how it works.

5) Every character in this campaign is going to have a mentor, to whom they must pay a stipend in turn for their support and training. Also, instant adventure hooks!

6) I think I'm going to use an XP for treasure rule, but I'm not sure how much yet.... 1 XP = 10 gp? 100 gp? Thoughts?

Also, one other thing I've been thinking about.... I'm going to make a bunch of pre-fabbed characters for the players to choose from to start, so we can speed things up. My question is... I want to have SOME background for the characters (to explain how they all know each other), but how much background is TOO much? I want to have room for these players to make the characters their own... as such, I'm letting the players select the alignments, after I explain what the alignments mean. Should I just make some real loose background connections between the characters, or go into some detail?

I fear my love of detail will bog this down... must learn to love less. 8)