Dragging objects around, need some help with joints

Ok, I’m currently trying to allow a character to grab onto a rope attached to a heavy metal ball, and drag it around

Until this point, i had a very workable grabbing system for objects, even for multipart ragdolls. It involves setting a part of the ragdoll to kinematic, and setting a part of my character that grabs it to be likewise. This seemed to work perfectly until i realised that it’s just ignoring physics. Which when applied to the rope and ball situation, results in my character being able to effortlessly yank around a ball of any mass. not good.

So i’m trying not making things kinematic. But this results in major issues. The ragdoll, which is made of character joints, simply drops to the ground. It gets sort of pulled along behind my character, but acts like it’s on a very loose spring (despite actually being on a fixed Joint)

I’ve tried connecting the ragdoll to the character with a characterjoint instead. This makes no apparent difference to the above mentioned behaviour. however if i turn Projection on for that joint, it instead causes my character to be launched into the atmosphere as everything spazzes out

Basically, i cannot figure out any way to make the whole system act as a cohesive unit. I would like, once the character and object are joined, that they behave like one solid chain. If a part of the object is too heavy, the character shouldn’t be able to move it.

I need some advice on how to get to that point The system i had originally was the most workable one, but only because it was faking the whole issue

Update: This is the closest i’ve gotten towards a real solution:

The bear is supposed to be hanging limply from the dog’s mouth. But at least neither it, nor the dog, are being launched into the sky

I got to this point with all joints made into character joints, and projection disabled everywhere.
Enabling projection on the joint where the bear connects to the dog, causes the bear to fly away.