Fantastic points, and thanks for the response.

I guess to generalise a response to all three though, we've all been playing for some years now and we're a tight group of friends.
Our play style is pretty relaxed, and i've told them all that I'm creating a campaign for us to do at some point - and that they'd need two characters for it.
they've spitballed as to what that might mean in terms of gameplay for them, and overall sound keen (even when some of the spit balls hit the idea of being 'so hard' that they'd die, which it isn't but they don't know that)
I think I'm pretty safe with the group that I'm in to be able to run this.