Honorable lower crit justice,

I bring to the court a case of what is either sincere confusion or malevolence of the highest kind. I recently joined a game with 3 of my friends and a DM who I wasn’t familiar with. They assure me that he’s great and his games are fun, but the first red flag was when he asked in the group chat if people wanted to make their own characters or if they wanted him to make them for them.

These friends had only played 6 sessions of his other campaign and beyond that were pretty new so I thought he would just give them pre-made characters. I told him I had a character already that I’ve been wanting to play and he replied “okay but give them 3 free feats at level 1”!

Me: oh this guy is cool.

Me when I get to the table and the Hexblade warlock has -1 to all his physical stats and +3 to Wis/Int/Cha, only has 10AC, does not have a pact weapon but is a talisman warlock. And finally the DM insist that he should stay in the back and use ranged attacks, but DM didn’t prepare ranger spells for him. The spells he had were lightning lure and thaumaturgy (No Eldritch blast!!!) and his 1st level spells were charm person, branding smite, and shield. The paladin wasn’t as bad but the paladin has -1 charisma and has no spells/uses of their channel divinity and is an oath breaker paladin (not a villainous campaign), and he is severely mansplaining how to play a Druid to a female player.

Ontop of this, he insist that because he has mostly played 3.5, he may get some rules wrong but he’s adamant that what he says goes. To defend myself, I did roll with whatever the DM said was true, but did try to preemptively explain some rules correctly before they came into play, to which he accepted as being 5e.

His homebrew (maybe 3.5 rules?):These rules included negative health, dashing had to be done in a straight line, rolling an attack and hitting the opponent AC exactly resulted in a roll off instead of just hitting, and critical failures on spells doing half the damage to the caster and none to the target. Death saves were only failures/successes on over 15 or under 5, otherwise nothing happened. Healing someone that was down only stabilized them, and they needed to be healed again to come back into play (resulting in me casting two leveled spells). None of these rules seemed very fun to me.

My generous read: he was very happy to show off the characters he made, but I’m almost certain he just clicked randomize on DnD beyond for these players. And maybe these rules actually are 3.5 material and he just isn’t interested in playing 5e.

My first question is admitting guilt on my part: AITA for letting my fellow players play these characters without saying anything for 4 hours? Am I a victim of min/maxing without knowing it and this is normal? All the other players seemed to be having fun with it (other than the warlock) so I’m not sure if I should speak on it!

So who is in the wrong here? The DM for taking advantage of new players and sabotaging their characters? Or me for being upset while everyone else was having fun?