Direction of VPN

When I establish a VPN connection between my Windows Server 2012 and an offsite Windows 7 machine, I can ping the server the VPN server resides on from the Windows 7 machine, but I can't ping the Windows 7 machine from the Windows 2012 Server. Is this normal? I've never used VPN before, so I'm not exactly sure if this is normal behavior.

I also noticed that the local network of both the Server and the offsite machine is 192.168.1.0/24. So when the VPN connection gets an IP from the VPN server, is it possible that the client might get assigned an address that also exists on the local network of the client? If this is a possibility, what is a good technique to prevent this from happening?

Thanks!