This post is (obviously) a follow-up to 5e is wrong about Charisma. If you haven’t read that post, this post is going to confuse you. If you aren’t familiar with Dungeons & Dragons, or what a roleplaying game is, or what saving throws are, this might be a bit of a stretch.

I haven’t dug deeper into the abilities of various monsters here. I have gone through every spell in the 2014 Player Handbook (PHB) which targets a mental saving throw. That means any spell that requires an Intelligence (INT), Wisdom (WIS), or Charisma (CHA) save. I’ve laid out a table with the spell names (sorted by level, alphabetized), what the original / current saving throw is, and what saving throw I suggest. Where further expansion on my thinking seems necessary, I’ve added notes below the table.

I’ve also laid out my thinking about what the mental attributes represent in their respective saving throws. Strangely the 2014 PHB doesn’t lay out much guidance on this front. The relevant pages are p179 and p205 PHB, and both entries are quite short. The pages preceding p179 are useful for descriptions of attributes, but they run afoul of my gripes aired in my previous post. The 2014 Dungeon Master Guide (DMG) has better guidance in a table on p238, but it seems clear (from comparing that table to the required saving throws of many 5e spells) that many of 5e’s spells from the 2014 PHB only loosely follow the guidance on that page.

So… what are the underlying principles that I’m trying to follow?