pinning flag to pole: do I need an Empty? This I fear counts as a Stupid Question (and there are indeed such things) but... I have placed a Cloth object (vertical subdivided plane, Cloth physics) up against a pole (tall skinny cylinder, rigid body, non-dynamic) and then pinned the cloth by the row of vertices adjacent to the pole.  I then selected cloth, then pole, then (Physics tools) Connect, Fixed.  What I expected:  the cloth would be glued to the pole at their relative positions as of Frame 1, attached at its pins, but would flutter freely.  What really happened:  The cloth flutters freely... while slowly sliding down the pole!

Reading some hints and tutorials I see that many recommend parenting the cloth to an Empty and the Empty to a solid object -- pole, whatever.  Is this indeed SOP?  Is a cloth incapable of participating in a RB physics Connection so that there must be an intermediary Parent relationship with a third object?

Also, I thought I had seen demos in which a Cloth object was simply pinned in mid-air by its own vertices, with no other object to constrain it... more experimentation needed...
AOQ:  yes, I can pin the flag in midair.  For some reason on my first attempt, I didn't create the vertex group I thought I had created.  On the 2nd attempt -- I would swear I went through the same steps each time, but there it is -- the vertex group was correctly created and works as a pin, and everything is dandy.

If the flagpole moved, and I wanted the flag to follow it, would the best practise then be to use an Empty between the moving pole and the flapping cloth?