@AbdulAlhazred and
@kenada
thank you for your replies. I understood the game to be about being dregs and spending their time exploring and trying to survive"dark places". I was wondering how focused it was on those things or if it could do more outside that as my players like to do more than spend their time "in dark places". They like to explore the land, occasionally deal with other matters related to character backstories. For example. lowly court servant PC, who escapes to adventurer leaving behind their love, and later returns to find they were framed for a crime by someone whom had eyes on their love and having to set things right.
So, essentially, I was tryinng to get a clearer idea if Torchbearer would be the right game for my group. One review mentioned that Social Conflict is handled like normal conflict and that while adventuring there is a clock (?) that opposes conditions. So, I was wondering if the game could handle the party returning to the castle and, as the party tries to clear their friends name, the clock could be used to impose some kind of relevant conditions as time gets closer to the PC's sentencing.
From your replies, I am guessing that I and my players would be better served by another game.
.
To a degree it depends on what 'phase' action happens during. In adventure phase each action a party member takes advances the grind. Every 4 ticks of the grind imposes a condition on each PC (which is normally Hungry/Thirsty, which you then immediately cure by eating or drinking, which itself doesn't use any grind). Once you run out of water/rations then eventually you would start accumulating nastier conditions, though adventures IME have not lasted long enough for much of that to happen so far. Now, if you are in 'town phase' then there's not a grind, but instead there's lifestyle cost. So, if a castle is a civilized place, then it might count as 'town' (there are several subtypes of towns). Conflicts and such can certainly happen inside the town, so in TB you'd have to choose which phase is in force, which changes the overall turn/exploration type mechanics considerably (and town is mostly intended to be a place where you rest, though most anything COULD happen there).
TB2 is a pretty Narratively focused and player focused game which is not much about 'setting tourism' IMHO. The intent is for there to be pretty much constant pressure on the PCs. You don't normally 'wander around looking for stuff to do' all that much, trouble finds you! If nothing else, then something your character cares about is likely to be threatened soon. At the least you are required to have goals, instincts, a creed, friends/enemies (usually), family (optional but often present), etc. Best case you are low on torches and food pretty soon, or lifestyle cost is threatening to jack way beyond what you can pay and you need to go out looking for coins and such so you can feed yourself. Life is never easy, So, the story you outlined could well happen. The lover could be a 'friend', mechanically, and the castle a 'town', etc.
Conflicts are all handled using a similar system, though it has somewhat different parameters depending on the type of challenge. It could be a fight, kill/capture/drive off, or a convince (social), and there are a couple other types. Conflicts are a bit like melee in some other games, more abstract than 5e, but there's a rough analogy. Each side picks tactics, etc. and then stuff happens, wash, rinse, repeat. I'd note that TB is not super intent on any kind of 'simulationist' approach to things, its a game, and the fiction is important and feeds back into mechanics, but it isn't as cut and dried as D&D where each attack roll is definitely a specific type of individual action against a specific target.