Question Port Forwarding

[Somro]

What is Port Forwarding and why use it with a VPN?

 

[kanewolf]

What is Port Forwarding and why use it with a VPN?

First what kind of VPN? A VPN to another location from your router/PC or a VPN initiated from an external PC to your router? Those are two very different "VPNs" ...
Port forwarding is a method of getting WAN data to a specific device on the LAN. A network connection has to parts, an IP address and a port. There are well known ports like 80 for HTTP traffic.
But lets say you setup a minecraft server. External users could not access it because the firewall in your home router would prevent that externally initiated traffic from reaching your server. So a list of known ports required for minecraft traffic is published and you set port forwarding rules in your firewall to allow traffic in.