The orc captain, the small town sitting quietly a hundred yards away, orders a charge. His brethren thunder down into the valley behind him, crashing to a stop only when he roars a second time. Their clouds of dust blow over a man not twenty paces from the town's edge, bearing worn pauldrons, a cracked breastplate, dented greaves, and one half gauntlet. His hand is steady, and his sword point does not waver from its target.
"Leave this place. You will find only death here," he tells the army.
The orc captain wastes no time in responding, "HA! You?! One puny human against a legion of MY orcs? YOU will only find death here."
He tightens his arm, raising his shield, and sinks into a wide stance.
"Then come."
The swarm of iron, stench, and battlecries consumes him, and it is the last he knows.
Brave or stupid? The timeless question. Out of my own investigations and responses from others, it comes down to fewer factors than I originally thought. For some, it is a matter of outcome. Others examine the situation itself, and still more say they look at what lies in the mind of the man (or woman-please, being PC detracts from an article, but if you know me, I'm all about equality).
The man dies in the quip above, and by the first standard, his failure proves his stupidity. Even in a world of epic fighters and legendary heroes, everyone has their breaking point, an amount of enemies over which they cannot triumph. How do we say that a respected general that dies after defeating 50 enemies is stupid (killed by the 51st) and a brawler who staggers out of a fight with 10 is brave? What if it was the general that defeated the 10 men when we know he can handle 20? Presentation of the question as thus tells me that a simple succeed or fail is not enough for adequate judgment.
Now we fill out the details. If the town had been evacuated some days earlier, with its people hiding in a secure location, or having sought the protection of the nearby metropolis, then yes, we might consider the man stupid; the town was already saved. If the townspeople were escaping at that very moment, and every other able bodied man had a family to keep or skills needed to get them to safety, then the man might be considered brave; his sacrifice could buy them precious time and distance. In another sense, he could have set traps in the streets, then led them down a devastating path that would give the men and women more time. In comparison to such a plan, his sacrifice seems fruitless, stupid. All of these factors are able to decide quite obviously the nature of the man's actions.
What could the man's mind possibly have to do with it? Return to the Buying Time situation: he is fully aware that he composes the last line of defense that the townspeople have. To me, this knowledge shows his courage; there is no doubt he will die, and yet his purpose pushes him to act so. Suppose he were gullible and believed his friends' adamant profession that he could win versus an entire legion. A fighter should know his limits, and his lack of this recognition would support stupidity. And if the town were already evacuated? What matters, again, is knowledge, but here, knowing the town is evacuated shows stupidity, and not knowing shows the opposite. When it comes down to it, simply knowing or not knowing is not the deciding factor: it is what one does or doesn't know.
So how exactly can we apply this to Dagorhir? Can we say Oger is brave for charging into the ranks of the Guard when he is only sacrificing the few minutes it takes to walk back to the rez point? Even without resurrection, we still rise to fight again. In matters of giving up ‘life,' the way to courage is to treat each time we fall as a real death. No, not actually playing it out (though it does add to the realism): adopting the mentality. Play Elysium from the Gladiator Soundtrack in your head, or imagine the Massacre at Wounded Knee-whatever it takes. It is, after all, the little things that make Dagorhir more than a game.
Dagorhir, like the mundane, will also test your morals and beliefs, as I have found, and will bring out courage sure enough. We cannot count those brave who simply stand against the crowd; we look instead at what they stand for, and why they stand, and if their reasoning is sound. If heralds told the Militia to leave the field, we would admire Sarge for not following such an order; one might wonder, however, if he refused to do so because he would not admit the illegality of the potatopult. Before you settle down on an opinion, play a serious devil's advocate, and then see if your beliefs can be reaffirmed.
So ends my investigation. In finding that knowledge only separates bravery and stupidity, perhaps we may find our characters are not so fantastical as we think them to be.