I had a player ask me how much actual meditation is needed for Battle Meditation because he's thinking about learning it. There isn't anything specific in the rules (other than the name of the Force power) so I'm inclined to think it's just that and, as long as he's aware of the battleground and what's going on, he'll be fine. Thoughts?

As much as the player wants. It's an action to activate, like most (all?) Force Powers. The rest is flavor.

Once you commit the force dice you can act normally without having to do anything else to maintain battle meditation, though I've been playing a very strong battle meditation based character recently and have found myself saying to the GM that they should not be afraid to make me roll Discipline checks to maintain the power if they feel like something is happening to my character that should break concentration.

In all honesty, battle meditation is kind of broken. I can essentially make an entire party nearly unable to fail skill checks for an entire game if I roll enough pips to hit them with +3 successes and then commit my force dice.

24 minutes ago, Sharatec said:

As much as the player wants. It's an action to activate, like most (all?) Force Powers. The rest is flavor.

To clarify: It's an Action to give the bonus (to an applicable number of allies) through the end of your next turn. So, it's an Action every round (until you get the Control upgrade to Commit) if you want to constantly give the bonus.

So they can still Maneuver, speak, and perform immediate actions, etc.

Which is to say, just follow the mechanics for the mechanical penalty/cost. Anything beyond that is fluff.

And this is at least somewhat reflected in the books I've read (Battle Meditation is very prominent in the Darth Bane Series book 1). Force users are using Battle Med and walk around tents, having conversations, but they do depict them actually meditating for it too.

Like Aetrion said, there is the "Commit" option, but it's an upgrade you need to buy and you can only use it once you get to Force Rating 3. So, it's a question of relative power level to me.

Edit: by which I mean, it's not so overpowered when your peers are doing things like throwing Force Lightning or moving AT-STs