Trouble setting up ssh/ovpn

Hi,
I’m not that good with networking, but I’d need to set up a couple of raspberry pi’s to remote locations running telegram bots. Just in case I need to update them or something some day I’d like to set up an openvpn server to my home network so I can SSH into them if I need to.

I have an Asus RT-AC51U router which comes with ddns and openvpn support out of the box and I have set them up so I can talk to the router from wan, but I can’t ping anything else on my home network. Tracepath also fails. When connected straight into the network I can ping/ssh into the devices just fine so I don’t think it’s a problem with them.

I tried turning off my firewall on the router and nothing happened. What would be the best way to do this and what am I doing wrong if my idea of making the remote raspis phone home over a vpn and then ssh’ng into them isn’t totally stupid.

edit:
I had to add redirect-gateway def1 to my .ovpn, is it some line I’m missing in my asus .ovpn that is preventing me from talking to other things on the network?