NPC character doesn't animate? (and other small questions)

So in my game, I have a lobby, which consists of a room, the player's camera overlooking the room, and a npc figure sitting on a bench, looping a sitting animation. I make the figure in a LocalScript, so only the player sees it, as many people are going to be in the lobby at the same time. My LocalScript creates the figure, and then Clone()s the animation Script, as well as the animations, and then that Script plays the animation in a loop. Everything works perfectly in Studio, but in-game, the character doesn't animate.The animation script doesn't print anything to any out output in-game. I don't know how to fix this.

Then, I have another question. To create the figure, I Clone() the player's avatar, re-name it, and then remove the scripts, sounds and so on, leaving me with a humanoid figure that has the same appearance as the actual player. This method works perfectly, however my brother noted that his avatar loads without clothes or accesories; could this be because the avatar gets cloned before those things load?

My last question is, would it be more effective and cleaner for a ServerScript to detect when a player joins, make an entirely new lobby (by Clone() ing a template in ServerStorage), then make the figure, and assign that lobby to the player it was created for? I believe this could fix some problems, but I don't know if it is neater or more efficient than just making one lobby and doing things with LocalScripts.

It would be wonderful if I could get answers for every question, thanks a lot for taking your time to think about this c: