Issue with translating/rotating rigid bodies

[TheLombax]

First I must say that I am very new to Maya, dynamics, and any 3d modeling in general. I am right now taking my first class in it.

I am trying to animate a claw machine claw that opens and closes. I want the "fingers" of the claw to be passive rigid bodies, so they can close around the active rigid items in the claw machine.

Right now I have each "finger" of the claw as a cylinder that's extruded along a curve. Each finger is in a realign group by itself, just to retain the object coordinate space to make rotation along one axis easier. The claw will open and close simply by rotating the fingers along their object Z-space.

Whenever I make one of the fingers a passive (or active, for that matter) rigid body, the finger snaps to some different location. Then, whenever I try to translate or rotate the rigid body finger, it moves in a straight line off into space. It does not move in the direction that I am attempting to translate it to it, either.

I read that rigid bodies cannot be part of a group, so I experimented with a standalone regular cylinder (not extruded along a curve). I first rotated the cylinder, then made it rigid. It still snapped to a different location upon becoming rigid, and displayed the same weird behavior when moving it.

Does anyone know what is going wrong? Am I missing something? Additionally, if there is a better way to simulate the physics of a claw machine without making teh claw rigid like this, please let me know.

Thank you!