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In the original post I described the result as behaving like an "actual chain". By "actual chain" I meant something you'd buy at a hardware store. Metal or plastic, doesn't matter, with links and all that.
Here's a description of the effect I want:
Say you buy a 5 foot chain at a hardware store and pin each end to the ground, but only 3 feet apart; there will be slack in the chain. You can then grab any link and drag it along the ground until you run out of slack and the chain becomes taut. Inertia keeps any segment from moving until it's forced to, which happens when the slack between it and the link being pulled is gone.
Traditional/simple IK has you grab the end of the bone chain and the segments in the chain follow. (We all know that, I'm just setting up a comparison.) What I want is to be able to grab any bone in the chain, not just the endpoint, then pull that bone in some direction, and have all the other segments follow until the chain becomes taut.
I don't remember if there were anchors. I don't think I needed any, because I'm pretty sure I had IK set up between the endpoint bones; that would keep the ends anchored. I can't remember what I did with the bones between. Probably at least gave them unlimited ball joint modifiers. I did something to constrain the distance between them. But, as I say, experiments trying to recreate that haven't been successful.
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