But I did have a quick, totally untested thought on the subject of fleeing and retreating from combat—PF2e having no such system and the designers seemingly being hostile to the idea entirely is one of the enduring obstacles to running PF2e in an old-school fashion.
If, in the middle of combat, one player expresses a desire to retreat, this will often lead to an argument, breaking the flow of the game and bringing what should be a tense fight to a screeching halt. If such a situation arises, consider doing this: immediately call an end to out-of-character discussion and instruct all players to decide, on their own, whether they should retreat, and to pass that decision to you in a hidden note. Then continue the combat as normal. At the top of the next round, the players who decided to retreat have done so, if they are able.
I like this outline of a process because it invokes the chaos of battle and the fog of war; you don't always have total understanding of what your allies are doing, and you also don't have the ability to convince them to stand fast the moment they start to waver. Unit cohesion is determined by factors off the battlefield, and the degree to which player characters act in unison should also, in part, be a matter of player cohesion.
Is this anything?
