I'm a little confused about the difference between CHA and WIS saves. The skills associated with Wisdom and Charisma generally make sense to me, but things get muddled when it comes to saving throws and spellcasting abilities. This all started because I wanted to make a Magical Girl class, and several people kept telling me that it should be CHA based instead of WIS, but that's a different topic.
Anyways,
Automatically I associate Wisdom saves with a) noticing things that are "hidden" or b) overcoming things through force of will, like mentally overriding your fear instincts. WIS saves are used to disbelieve illusions, but also to resist the effects of charm spells and Polymorph. Even in Pathfinder, WIS saves were called Will saves. So tome, wisdom = willpower, and mental discipline. It is understanding and therefore being able to override your instincts, senses, and below-the-surface thoughts. Not having one cookie now means I get to have two cookies later, so I will wait.
...But then it seems that CHA is also sometimes considered a "force of will", like in the description for the Warlock's spellcasting. And even stranger still, CHA saves are needed to resist spells like Banishment and Magic Circle.
Is there something I'm missing here, or do you think things are a bit jumbled up conceptually just to make all the saves balanced? I always assumed that CHA is enacting your will on others while WIS is enacting your will on yourself, but that doesn't seem to allign with game's mechanics.
Please describe for us as best you can the nature of the ability that would cause the saving throw and what the effect would do. Based on that, maybe we can suggest whether WIS or CHA is the better save.
Wis represents your instincts and the speed of thought.
Charisma is your presence, personality and soul
Spells like Banishment and Magic Circle affect the presence of the target in the plane hence Cha.
Spells like Fear target your instinctual fight or flight hence Wis. Hold Person and Slow target Wis because it isn't the spell making you slow, it's affecting your body's ability to instinctively control its movement.
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Please describe for us as best you can the nature of the ability that would cause the saving throw and what the effect would do. Based on that, maybe we can suggest whether WIS or CHA is the better save.
I'm mainly trying to understand where the divide is between WIS-based willpower and CHA-based willpower.
To me, Charisma is enacting your will on others--social skills, deception, communication, persuasion, intimidation, etc. All those skills make sense to me. It makes sense with the dictionary definition of charisma.
Wisdom is more based on noticing, understanding, and acting on this understanding. Insight, Perception and Animal Handling are all about understanding different cues and learning to look at things a different way--looking beyond the facade or, to put it another way, pushing past your initial feelings. This is at least how WIS saves seem to work. It's not "I know it isn't real so I am not afraid," but rathing I think it's "I am afraid, but I know it isn't real so I will push through". Basically I see WIS saves as understanding and overriding your instincts through force of will.
...So really I don't understand where CHA lands in terms of saving throws or spellcasting ability. I don't understand why resisting charm, fear, illusions, and POLYMORPH of all things are WIS, but resisting Possession and Banishment are CHA. The distinction just seems so arbitrary.
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"The beating sound is not my sympathetic heart, but a time bomb."
Please describe for us as best you can the nature of the ability that would cause the saving throw and what the effect would do. Based on that, maybe we can suggest whether WIS or CHA is the better save.
I'm mainly trying to understand where the divide is between WIS-based willpower and CHA-based willpower.
To me, Charisma is enacting your will on others--social skills, deception, communication, persuasion, intimidation, etc. All those skills make sense to me. It makes sense with the dictionary definition of charisma.
Wisdom is more based on noticing, understanding, and acting on this understanding. Insight, Perception and Animal Handling are all about understanding different cues and learning to look at things a different way--looking beyond the facade or, to put it another way, pushing past your initial feelings. This is at least how WIS saves seem to work. It's not "I know it isn't real so I am not afraid," but rathing I think it's "I am afraid, but I know it isn't real so I will push through". Basically I see WIS saves as understanding and overriding your instincts through force of will.
...So really I don't understand where CHA lands in terms of saving throws or spellcasting ability. I don't understand why resisting charm, fear, illusions, and POLYMORPH of all things are WIS, but resisting Possession and Banishment are CHA. The distinction just seems so arbitrary.
You've almost got it. Charisma is also exerting your will over things other than people too. Most Charisma spellcasters will magic to happen themselves (warlocks are different, not getting into that). Wisdom spellcasters cast magic through connection and understanding with a deity or nature.
Similarly, wisdom saves use your connection to or understanding of the world to overcome them and charisma saves are straight up battles of willpower or assertion of existence.
Yeah, Paladins are Charisma-based not because they're a bunch of handsome chads, but because their powers are fueld by the strength of their convictions. I 100% agree with you that there is a lot of overlap between Wisdom and Charisma, just as there is overlap between Wisdom and Intelligence. The mental stats aren't as conceptually distinct as the physical stats are (and even they have overlap).
Both Wisdom and Charisma carry a certain amount of "willpower" to them. But I think of Wisdom as the sort of abilty to draw strength from understanding, or ability to stay focused, or staying logical instead of emotional. While the willpower of Charisma comes from believing in yourself, or having an ideal you'll sacrifice anything for, or just being so fired up that you won't let anything stop you.
I'm mainly trying to understand where the divide is between WIS-based willpower and CHA-based willpower...
... The distinction just seems so arbitrary.
It kind of is arbitrary.
For me, I think about it by aligning the mental attributes with the Physical ones. Wisdom is like mental Constitution. If something like Fear is assaulting your mind and soul, then Wisdom resists. Charisma is somewhat like Strength; it is the force of your will and of your personality. When banishment tries to push your whole being into another plane, Charisma pushes back. Intelligence gets to be Dexterity then, managing the delicate higher functions. When something targets those are functions then perhaps your Intelligence dodges the effect.
A laboured analogy which probably doesn't hold in all cases, but I believe the guiding principle is Wisdom is a sort of baseline mental resilience, while the other two represent active resistance against an effect.
I'm mainly trying to understand where the divide is between WIS-based willpower and CHA-based willpower.
It's messy and inconsistent.
Charisma is your centredness, your sense of self, your ability to resist things that affect your identity. It also represents your connection to your home plane. It resists possession, banishment, plane shifting and attempts to reveal or affect your emotions (calm emotion, zone of truth).
Willpower is your intuition and your ability to notice details of the world around you. It resists illusions and phantasms (you notice inconsistencies about the magic), charm (you intuit that this person is not really your friend).
Wisdom is also your "willpower" stat, used in resisting fear and panic and domination, but sometimes Charisma is used for this instead. There doens't seem to be reasons for which one is used, the willpower bit is probably a holdover from Will saves in previous editions.
I would have made Charisma the saving throw for the fear and domination spells, as well as polymorph.
I'm mainly trying to understand where the divide is between WIS-based willpower and CHA-based willpower...
... The distinction just seems so arbitrary.
It kind of is arbitrary.
For me, I think about it by aligning the mental attributes with the Physical ones. Wisdom is like mental Constitution. If something like Fear is assaulting your mind and soul, then Wisdom resists. Charisma is somewhat like Strength; it is the force of your will and of your personality. When banishment tries to push your whole being into another plane, Charisma pushes back. Intelligence gets to be Dexterity then, managing the delicate higher functions. When something targets those are functions then perhaps your Intelligence dodges the effect.
A laboured analogy which probably doesn't hold in all cases, but I believe the guiding principle is Wisdom is a sort of baseline mental resilience, while the other two represent active resistance against an effect.
I had tried with that analogy, too, in comparing WIS to CON. It's messy, but I think it works for my purposes.
I think part of the messiness comes from the fact that some of these spell effects are mental, like Fear or Charm and arguably Possession, so a mental save like Wis, Int, or Cha makes sense...but then spells like Polymorph and Banishment are physical effects. I almost want them to be CON saves, or something else entirely.
I feel like the saves on these spells are more based on the classes they represent than the abilities themselves, i.e. a WIS-based Druid who wildshapes all the time should have no problem resisting a Polymorph spell, whereas a CHA based Paladin, Warlock, or Sorcerer who get their power from an "outside source" should have no problem resisting banishment to another plane since they walk the line between worlds all day. I dunno. It just seems weird to me that a 1st level Bard might resist Banishment better than a 10th level Wizard because he has a stronger "social presence" or "sense of self".
Spellcasters all have a spellsave DC and a spell attack modifier--I feel like they should have a "spell resist" modifier too--instead of relying on an ability score alone, you could get a bonus based on whether or not that spell is on your Class's spell list.
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"The beating sound is not my sympathetic heart, but a time bomb."
I do wonder sometimes how much the designers "balanced" what save something targets, as opposed to just picking what sounds good. For the most part there's a pretty clear thematic line around Strength save spells (resist being grabbed or pushed, e.g. Entangle), Con save spells (resist dying or getting sick or physically compromised, e.g. Blight), and Dex save spells (dodge spatial effects, e.g. Fireball)... but then the mental ones are all pretty fuzzy. Why are there only 10 Int save spells (4 of which are UA)? They seem to be about resisting intrusion into one's mind... except other similar spells like Detect Thoughts are Wisdom saves? Cha saves are often involved in banishment type effects or spells targeting your soul or personhood... but then also include Calm Emotions, which seems like it should be Intelligence or Wisdom? Wisdom saves are just a catch all for all mental saves it seems, and don't really have any sort of theme like "resist being tricked" or "shake off magical compulsion".
In prior editions, game systems recognized explicitly that there were really only three types of save: tough it out physically, dodge it physically, or mentally resist it. Its only in 5E that we now have six types of save, and yet, the designers haven't really seemed to have embraced and taken advantage of that in a meaningful way, leaving it sort of slap dash and haphazard whether Proficiency in Int and Cha saves has any value at all.
I've considered moving resistance to all Charm type spells over to Charisma, but it's really somewhat difficult to distinguish. Based on the non-spellcasting effects associated with the stats, I'd be tempted to just move Wisdom casters over to Charisma (Wisdom is mostly awareness and control of self, Charisma is about influencing others, implying save DC should be based on Wisdom when affecting yourself, Charisma when affecting others -- but spells that target self mostly don't have saves).
Having all saves be CON, DEX, WIS, and dropping each class down to just receiving proficiency in one of the three, would not really be unbalanced. It would require very little fiddling too, just all Str save spells become Con saves, and all Int and Cha save spells become Wis. Con, Dex, and Wis are already the least likely stats to be tanked to 8, so this wouldn't really hurt players, nor affect the balance of what they're saving against 99% of the time.
The problem with moving everything over to Con, Dex, and Wis is that, as you note, people already don't tank those stats, and having stats you don't use isn't good design. I think that's the reason they went to saves with all stats in the first place, its just they didn't do a terribly good job because the distinctions between mental attributes have always been slightly confused.
Well, STR and INT saves are already almost nonexistent, and players already tank those as a result of that and of those modifiers being irrelevant to most classes and most gameplay situations (except athletics checks... but proficiency is enough to compensate poor strength). CHA is a main stat for four classes and a likely middling stat for rogues, so it’s not in as much danger of being dumped even with no CHA saves. I don’t see going back to Con, Ref, and Will as fundamentally changing how players build their characters, it would just streamline play a little (which 5E usually embraces, its odd that this may be the one and only game system they made MORE nuanced and complicated than 3.5, and as noted, they’ve done so half heartedly).
There's a fair number of critters that force Strength saves, though you could probably transform them all to Athletics checks and the effects they trigger are mostly modest (forced movement, Grappled, Prone, occasionally Restrained).
So, considering this from another angle, you can view the mental attributes as parallel to physical attributes -- Wisdom is your self-control (Con), Charisma is influencing the outside world (Str), and Intelligence is doing things by technique rather than force (Dex). This lets me split logical spell saves into these categories:
Charisma: any effect that controls or restricts your action without changing your beliefs about those actions.
Intelligence: any effect that attempts to confuse or trick you into improper action. Includes most Illusions.
Wisdom: any effect that tries to change your beliefs or emotions, including any spell that applies Charm or Fear.
(note that this in general assumes the relative importance of Investigation vs Perception should be more tilted towards Investigation).
Going through the PHB spells in order, ones that change
Sanctuary -> Charisma
Tasha's Hideous Laughter -> Intelligence (mostly because it already has an Intelligence requirement)
Detect Thoughts -> Charisma (mostly because Deception is Charisma)
Please describe for us as best you can the nature of the ability that would cause the saving throw and what the effect would do. Based on that, maybe we can suggest whether WIS or CHA is the better save.
I'm mainly trying to understand where the divide is between WIS-based willpower and CHA-based willpower.
To me, Charisma is enacting your will on others--social skills, deception, communication, persuasion, intimidation, etc. All those skills make sense to me. It makes sense with the dictionary definition of charisma.
Wisdom is more based on noticing, understanding, and acting on this understanding. Insight, Perception and Animal Handling are all about understanding different cues and learning to look at things a different way--looking beyond the facade or, to put it another way, pushing past your initial feelings. This is at least how WIS saves seem to work. It's not "I know it isn't real so I am not afraid," but rathing I think it's "I am afraid, but I know it isn't real so I will push through". Basically I see WIS saves as understanding and overriding your instincts through force of will.
...So really I don't understand where CHA lands in terms of saving throws or spellcasting ability. I don't understand why resisting charm, fear, illusions, and POLYMORPH of all things are WIS, but resisting Possession and Banishment are CHA. The distinction just seems so arbitrary.
Hmmm. Polymorph is a weird one. The others I would describe the WIS save as being able to control your senses to perceive the reality behind an illusion. Charm makes the caster *seem* like a friend, fear makes the caster *seem* frightening, but your wisdom/insight can overcome those illusions. Maybe in the case of polymorph it could be your ability to percieve that you are not, in fact, a sheep, and thus to maintain your true form.
Possession and banishment are either taking control of you or sending your soul to another plane. Charisma is your force of "self" to resist those and maintain control of your "self."
So, considering this from another angle, you can view the mental attributes as parallel to physical attributes -- Wisdom is your self-control (Con), Charisma is influencing the outside world (Str), and Intelligence is doing things by technique rather than force (Dex). This lets me split logical spell saves into these categories:
The mental abilities really can't be matched up to the physical like that. Intelligence is usually far more brute-force than charisma, but both can applied to a situation either with force or with finesse.
Charisma: any effect that controls or restricts your action without changing your beliefs about those actions.
Intelligence: any effect that attempts to confuse or trick you into improper action. Includes most Illusions.
Wisdom: any effect that tries to change your beliefs or emotions, including any spell that applies Charm or Fear.
I would absolutely swap your descriptions of Wisdom and Charisma here. Charisma is about personality and sense of self; anything that changes your beliefs/personality/identity should target Charisma (personally I houserule that any charm or charmlike effect is a Charisma save; fear I'm fine with as Wisdom).
I would absolutely swap your descriptions of Wisdom and Charisma here. Charisma is about personality and sense of self; anything that changes your beliefs/personality/identity should target Charisma (personally I houserule that any charm or charmlike effect is a Charisma save; fear I'm fine with as Wisdom).
If you look at the non-spell effects, it's clear that it's Charisma you use to influence other people, and Wisdom to avoid being influenced.
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I'm a little confused about the difference between CHA and WIS saves. The skills associated with Wisdom and Charisma generally make sense to me, but things get muddled when it comes to saving throws and spellcasting abilities. This all started because I wanted to make a Magical Girl class, and several people kept telling me that it should be CHA based instead of WIS, but that's a different topic.
Anyways,
Automatically I associate Wisdom saves with a) noticing things that are "hidden" or b) overcoming things through force of will, like mentally overriding your fear instincts. WIS saves are used to disbelieve illusions, but also to resist the effects of charm spells and Polymorph. Even in Pathfinder, WIS saves were called Will saves. So to me, wisdom = willpower, and mental discipline. It is understanding and therefore being able to override your instincts, senses, and below-the-surface thoughts.
Not having one cookie now means I get to have two cookies later, so I will wait....But then it seems that CHA is also sometimes considered a "force of will", like in the description for the Warlock's spellcasting. And even stranger still, CHA saves are needed to resist spells like Banishment and Magic Circle.
Is there something I'm missing here, or do you think things are a bit jumbled up conceptually just to make all the saves balanced? I always assumed that CHA is enacting your will on others while WIS is enacting your will on yourself, but that doesn't seem to allign with game's mechanics.
"The beating sound is not my sympathetic heart, but a time bomb."
♦Character art commissions♦
Please describe for us as best you can the nature of the ability that would cause the saving throw and what the effect would do. Based on that, maybe we can suggest whether WIS or CHA is the better save.
"Not all those who wander are lost"
Wis represents your instincts and the speed of thought.
Charisma is your presence, personality and soul
Spells like Banishment and Magic Circle affect the presence of the target in the plane hence Cha.
Spells like Fear target your instinctual fight or flight hence Wis. Hold Person and Slow target Wis because it isn't the spell making you slow, it's affecting your body's ability to instinctively control its movement.
Click ✨ HERE ✨ For My Youtube Videos featuring Guides, Tips & Tricks for using D&D Beyond.
Need help with Homebrew? Check out ✨ this FAQ/Guide thread ✨ by IamSposta.
I'm mainly trying to understand where the divide is between WIS-based willpower and CHA-based willpower.
To me, Charisma is enacting your will on others--social skills, deception, communication, persuasion, intimidation, etc. All those skills make sense to me. It makes sense with the dictionary definition of charisma.
Wisdom is more based on noticing, understanding, and acting on this understanding. Insight, Perception and Animal Handling are all about understanding different cues and learning to look at things a different way--looking beyond the facade or, to put it another way, pushing past your initial feelings. This is at least how WIS saves seem to work. It's not "I know it isn't real so I am not afraid," but rathing I think it's "I am afraid, but I know it isn't real so I will push through". Basically I see WIS saves as understanding and overriding your instincts through force of will.
...So really I don't understand where CHA lands in terms of saving throws or spellcasting ability. I don't understand why resisting charm, fear, illusions, and POLYMORPH of all things are WIS, but resisting Possession and Banishment are CHA. The distinction just seems so arbitrary.
"The beating sound is not my sympathetic heart, but a time bomb."
♦Character art commissions♦
You've almost got it. Charisma is also exerting your will over things other than people too. Most Charisma spellcasters will magic to happen themselves (warlocks are different, not getting into that). Wisdom spellcasters cast magic through connection and understanding with a deity or nature.
Similarly, wisdom saves use your connection to or understanding of the world to overcome them and charisma saves are straight up battles of willpower or assertion of existence.
Yeah, Paladins are Charisma-based not because they're a bunch of handsome chads, but because their powers are fueld by the strength of their convictions. I 100% agree with you that there is a lot of overlap between Wisdom and Charisma, just as there is overlap between Wisdom and Intelligence. The mental stats aren't as conceptually distinct as the physical stats are (and even they have overlap).
Both Wisdom and Charisma carry a certain amount of "willpower" to them. But I think of Wisdom as the sort of abilty to draw strength from understanding, or ability to stay focused, or staying logical instead of emotional. While the willpower of Charisma comes from believing in yourself, or having an ideal you'll sacrifice anything for, or just being so fired up that you won't let anything stop you.
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It kind of is arbitrary.
For me, I think about it by aligning the mental attributes with the Physical ones. Wisdom is like mental Constitution. If something like Fear is assaulting your mind and soul, then Wisdom resists. Charisma is somewhat like Strength; it is the force of your will and of your personality. When banishment tries to push your whole being into another plane, Charisma pushes back. Intelligence gets to be Dexterity then, managing the delicate higher functions. When something targets those are functions then perhaps your Intelligence dodges the effect.
A laboured analogy which probably doesn't hold in all cases, but I believe the guiding principle is Wisdom is a sort of baseline mental resilience, while the other two represent active resistance against an effect.
It's messy and inconsistent.
Charisma is your centredness, your sense of self, your ability to resist things that affect your identity. It also represents your connection to your home plane. It resists possession, banishment, plane shifting and attempts to reveal or affect your emotions (calm emotion, zone of truth).
Willpower is your intuition and your ability to notice details of the world around you. It resists illusions and phantasms (you notice inconsistencies about the magic), charm (you intuit that this person is not really your friend).
Wisdom is also your "willpower" stat, used in resisting fear and panic and domination, but sometimes Charisma is used for this instead. There doens't seem to be reasons for which one is used, the willpower bit is probably a holdover from Will saves in previous editions.
I would have made Charisma the saving throw for the fear and domination spells, as well as polymorph.
I had tried with that analogy, too, in comparing WIS to CON. It's messy, but I think it works for my purposes.
I think part of the messiness comes from the fact that some of these spell effects are mental, like Fear or Charm and arguably Possession, so a mental save like Wis, Int, or Cha makes sense...but then spells like Polymorph and Banishment are physical effects. I almost want them to be CON saves, or something else entirely.
I feel like the saves on these spells are more based on the classes they represent than the abilities themselves, i.e. a WIS-based Druid who wildshapes all the time should have no problem resisting a Polymorph spell, whereas a CHA based Paladin, Warlock, or Sorcerer who get their power from an "outside source" should have no problem resisting banishment to another plane since they walk the line between worlds all day. I dunno. It just seems weird to me that a 1st level Bard might resist Banishment better than a 10th level Wizard because he has a stronger "social presence" or "sense of self".
Spellcasters all have a spellsave DC and a spell attack modifier--I feel like they should have a "spell resist" modifier too--instead of relying on an ability score alone, you could get a bonus based on whether or not that spell is on your Class's spell list.
"The beating sound is not my sympathetic heart, but a time bomb."
♦Character art commissions♦
I do wonder sometimes how much the designers "balanced" what save something targets, as opposed to just picking what sounds good. For the most part there's a pretty clear thematic line around Strength save spells (resist being grabbed or pushed, e.g. Entangle), Con save spells (resist dying or getting sick or physically compromised, e.g. Blight), and Dex save spells (dodge spatial effects, e.g. Fireball)... but then the mental ones are all pretty fuzzy. Why are there only 10 Int save spells (4 of which are UA)? They seem to be about resisting intrusion into one's mind... except other similar spells like Detect Thoughts are Wisdom saves? Cha saves are often involved in banishment type effects or spells targeting your soul or personhood... but then also include Calm Emotions, which seems like it should be Intelligence or Wisdom? Wisdom saves are just a catch all for all mental saves it seems, and don't really have any sort of theme like "resist being tricked" or "shake off magical compulsion".
In prior editions, game systems recognized explicitly that there were really only three types of save: tough it out physically, dodge it physically, or mentally resist it. Its only in 5E that we now have six types of save, and yet, the designers haven't really seemed to have embraced and taken advantage of that in a meaningful way, leaving it sort of slap dash and haphazard whether Proficiency in Int and Cha saves has any value at all.
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I'm going to make this way harder than it needs to be.
I've considered moving resistance to all Charm type spells over to Charisma, but it's really somewhat difficult to distinguish. Based on the non-spellcasting effects associated with the stats, I'd be tempted to just move Wisdom casters over to Charisma (Wisdom is mostly awareness and control of self, Charisma is about influencing others, implying save DC should be based on Wisdom when affecting yourself, Charisma when affecting others -- but spells that target self mostly don't have saves).
Having all saves be CON, DEX, WIS, and dropping each class down to just receiving proficiency in one of the three, would not really be unbalanced. It would require very little fiddling too, just all Str save spells become Con saves, and all Int and Cha save spells become Wis. Con, Dex, and Wis are already the least likely stats to be tanked to 8, so this wouldn't really hurt players, nor affect the balance of what they're saving against 99% of the time.
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I'm going to make this way harder than it needs to be.
So basically, fortitude save, reflex save, and will save?
"Not all those who wander are lost"
The problem with moving everything over to Con, Dex, and Wis is that, as you note, people already don't tank those stats, and having stats you don't use isn't good design. I think that's the reason they went to saves with all stats in the first place, its just they didn't do a terribly good job because the distinctions between mental attributes have always been slightly confused.
Well, STR and INT saves are already almost nonexistent, and players already tank those as a result of that and of those modifiers being irrelevant to most classes and most gameplay situations (except athletics checks... but proficiency is enough to compensate poor strength). CHA is a main stat for four classes and a likely middling stat for rogues, so it’s not in as much danger of being dumped even with no CHA saves. I don’t see going back to Con, Ref, and Will as fundamentally changing how players build their characters, it would just streamline play a little (which 5E usually embraces, its odd that this may be the one and only game system they made MORE nuanced and complicated than 3.5, and as noted, they’ve done so half heartedly).
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I'm going to make this way harder than it needs to be.
There's a fair number of critters that force Strength saves, though you could probably transform them all to Athletics checks and the effects they trigger are mostly modest (forced movement, Grappled, Prone, occasionally Restrained).
So, considering this from another angle, you can view the mental attributes as parallel to physical attributes -- Wisdom is your self-control (Con), Charisma is influencing the outside world (Str), and Intelligence is doing things by technique rather than force (Dex). This lets me split logical spell saves into these categories:
(note that this in general assumes the relative importance of Investigation vs Perception should be more tilted towards Investigation).
Going through the PHB spells in order, ones that change
Hmmm. Polymorph is a weird one. The others I would describe the WIS save as being able to control your senses to perceive the reality behind an illusion. Charm makes the caster *seem* like a friend, fear makes the caster *seem* frightening, but your wisdom/insight can overcome those illusions. Maybe in the case of polymorph it could be your ability to percieve that you are not, in fact, a sheep, and thus to maintain your true form.
Possession and banishment are either taking control of you or sending your soul to another plane. Charisma is your force of "self" to resist those and maintain control of your "self."
The mental abilities really can't be matched up to the physical like that. Intelligence is usually far more brute-force than charisma, but both can applied to a situation either with force or with finesse.
I would absolutely swap your descriptions of Wisdom and Charisma here. Charisma is about personality and sense of self; anything that changes your beliefs/personality/identity should target Charisma (personally I houserule that any charm or charmlike effect is a Charisma save; fear I'm fine with as Wisdom).
If you look at the non-spell effects, it's clear that it's Charisma you use to influence other people, and Wisdom to avoid being influenced.