Quote Originally Posted by DwarfFighter View Post
Here's a challenge: Use your phone and set a 60 second countdown. Each time the alarm goes off, set a new 60 second countdown. Imagine that while the clock is counting down you can jump really far. Now, try to live your life and interact with friends, family and co-workers. Try to eat a meal, watch a show, raid a crack-house with the rest of the SWAT team, drive a car, buy milk.

It seems like a lot of effort to gain a benefit that is only occasionally beneficial. Also, you will appear to be INSANE with an obsessive compulsion.

-DF
It really depends on how big a distraction casting a spell is. If it's something you can do that's roughly akin to idly fiddling, you might do it intermittently so often that at any given point in time, your odds of having let it lapse are small. Think of it like a habit of fidgeting, or like eating popcorn at a movie theater, or humming to yourself, or even just playing with a fidget spinner or bao-ding balls.

Alternatively, if it is as distracting as having to get your phone out of your pocket (or off your belt clip, or whatever), and tell Siri or Google to reset the 1 minute timer, that's going to be distracting at the very least.

Sadly, when we really think about it, the latter is the more likely scenario, given that spells must be cast in a firm and clear voice, and gestures are at least problematic enough that they require a free hand (or a hand holding the material component), and jump does have all three (the material component is a grasshopper leg). Though Otherworldly Leap does obviate the need for the material component, so it's just saying something clearly and gesturing with a free hand every time you want to cast it.

In practice, I get the impression that D&D 5e expects rituals to be "at will" (just not during combat) and at will spells to be constantly up if the user wants them to be. In practice, stopping for 10 minutes while the wizard casts detect magic is a nuisance. One that would be put up with, given the stakes most of the time, but a nuisance. It certainly isn't something you'd do comfortably to keep, say, a phantom steed (let alone a party's worth of them) up at all times.

But I think, if we look back to the olden days of D&D, when dungeon crawling was done by "turns," we might see a way to at least reconcile the gameplay elements. A turn of dungeon crawling was, in fact, 10 minutes long. Each character could do one major dungeon-crawling activity in that time: search, move, or a few other things (disabling traps and picking locks). 3e made trap disabling and lockpicking doable in a matter of rounds (often 1). But if we returned to 10 minute turns, a carefully-exploring party could cover their "lead man's" movement distance (with him searching for traps, secret doors, etc.), and each other character could do a different task in that time. A single turn, then, is what it takes to cast a ritual! (Well, slightly more, but usually not enough more to worry about.)

I think I'm drifting of topic, here, though.

The point is, on the one hand, yes, you could fluff it such that it's just a sort of nervous tick to keep a spell up constantly. On the other, the way the rules present it don't make that fluff seem very likely.