What makes Lord of the Rings idealistic is not its setting. It’s the protagonists. Aragorn and Gandalf and especially Frodo steadfastly refuse to be corrupted by the evil that is constantly spreading throughout the land. Indeed, that is Frodo’s entire character arc (he finally buckles at the very end, but still, his entire superpower is that no one else could have held out for as long as he did). And this gets into the heart of how roleplaying games are collaborative storytelling. If you want a story of good triumphing over all the arsenal of evil, you can’t just give evil a bunch of orcs who do lots of pillaging and expect to get Lord of the Rings out of it. You need to confront your heroes with real, genuine temptation, to actually test their convictions, and have them resist the temptation and pass the test. In the context of a TTRPG, you need to confront your party with the cost of doing good, and they need to make the choice to pay that cost anyway, and you need to be ready to accept that some players (a surprisingly large majority, considering that the costs being paid are purely fictitious) will refuse to pay that cost. Collaborative storytelling means that you have to be ready to roll with it when your players make those kinds of decisions, rather than trying to remove agency from them by making the choice you want them to make the only way forward, or blatantly superior to alternatives. If the bad guys unequivocally want to destroy your heroes, so any kind of backing down from the fight wouldn’t just be unheroic, it would also be blatantly self-destructive, that’s not Lord of the Rings. That’s a filler episode of GI Joe.