Last session one of my players who plays a barbarian wanted to attach a rope to their javelin in order to utilize it to try and pull flying enemies within the javelin's range penalty. Almost like a Harpoon, I ended up adjudicating it as an improvised shoddy combat grapnel, considering if you were to grapple the enemy you could then reposition them as a way to pull them towards you.
But after researching the combat grapnel further, I realized by RAW you can't even use it to grapple in the first place considering grapple only interacts with reach, not range. It's almost like there should be a Ranged Grapple trait just like Ranged Trip. Although there is some kind of interesting interaction that could be adjudicated with giving the rope-javelin in this case the Tethered trait and *maybe* allowing Reposition to be used with that.
I also looked into more options to improvise this idea on and I saw the Harpoon Bolt. Would the Harpoon Bolt be fair in the case of this? It would definitely still be improvised/shoddy and it's range would be reduced greatly to the javelin's range or possibly lesser. I also think the DC would have to be adjusted and penalized, but what it should exactly be I don't know either.
So now I'm stumped on how to effectively rule the rope-javelin AND how one would try to grapple someone with ranged, like the combat grapnel as an example. This question is more focused towards how you could pull an enemy towards you, not just a flying combatant, because I know you could use something like a bola on a flying enemy to trip them and have them fall because of that, but I'm more focused on how to PULL an enemy by range, not trip. Would it hurt the game balance by allowing the Combat Grapnel to grapple at range? Does any one have any other advice on how to grapple at range?