I assume the Forge's approach to agendas is more of an analytic construct rather than a prescription for making a real game.
Not knowing the Forge's leading figures personally, but simply what they write and the games that they influence, I think the answer is "both".
In particular, there is a certain style of RPGIng - what I called (perhaps loosely) "mainstream" in my post upthread - to which they are hostile. What does this style look like? Well, I've just been reading
Darths & Droids, and the style of GMing and RPGing it presupposes and advocates in its author commentary is as good an illustration of the "mainstream" as any.
Some features of this approach are: a "campaign" or "story" pre-plotted by the GM, and the related notion of the "sidequest"; secret backstory that affects the fictional positioning according to which the success of player-initiated actions are resolved; an emphasis on "roleplaying" as a distinct activity from "roleplaying"; an assumption that a character sheet is something like a statistical inventory of a character; a focus in that statistical inventory on combat stats and equipment rather than (say) relationships and emotional states; a corresponding focus in the action resolution systems; etc.
One typical cosequence of the "mainstream" style is that the GM exercises a very large amount of control - which may or may not be revealed to the players - over what happens in the game, and the consequences of the players' choices.
Forge design, at least as I see it, is about (i) self-conscious awareness of these features of a game, and (ii) avoiding many of them.
while some RPGs may be designed for a single agenda, I don't think you'll find many such any more.
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For pretty much any Forgist agenda, if you really wanted to serve just one, an RPG would not be the best way to serve it. I think RPGs are, by their nature, mixed.
Based on nothing more than my own experience - which may therefore be pretty limiting - I think one main cleavage in contemporary RPG design is between overtly metagame mechanics and "traditional" mechanics - I hesitate to say "simulationinst" because I think mechanics like "natural armour bonus" and NPC/monster building in 3E more generally are traditional, but aren't simulationist in any clear sense (contrast say RM, RQ or Traveller).
For instance, this cleavage explains about 95% of the 3E vs 4e debates I've experienced; seems to explain about 95% of the current debates around "damage on a miss"; and was replicated in all the debates around Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, including whether or not it had a character build system (my answer - of course it did! It just wasn't a traditional one of either points buy or choosing one item from each of N lists).
But this design distinction bleeds into a lot of other issues as well, such as who has authority over plot, whether resolution is "task based" or "conflict/scene based", etc, which in turn bleed into larger agenda issues.
If you look at MHRP, for instance, it can't be played proccess-sim, nor (as far as I can see) with "step on up" - leaving only high concept sim ("I'm a big damn Marvel hero") or (thematically fairly light) narratvism ("Let's find out what this Marvel hero needs, and whether s/he can get it). I think this is actually not unlike 4e, except 4e, especially in its combat mechanics, also allows for a certain style of (non-Gygaxian) step-on-up.
I don't know if you would call these "single agenda" games, but I think they have a tightness in their design which to my mind makes them closer to Traveller, RQ or RM than (say) 2nd ed AD&D.
This is one of my biggest problems with the Forge approach: The assumption that an RPG should be designed to serve only one agenda. It's like saying that a car should be designed either to be fast, or to be reliable, or to be safe in a collision, and no car design should attempt to pursue more than one of these goals.
And thereby making perfect the enemy of good? Or, perhaps more importantly, forgetting the social nature of the endeavor, such that being with people may be a more important part of the experience than purity of the activity.
I can analogize to a dinner party.
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if my friend is vegetarian, I'm making sure there's food for her at the darn party! Integrity of the menu can go to heck!
I think the Forge view is predicated on the assumption that, as an activity, playing an RPG is different from driving a car or having friends over to a dinner party. This assumption may be true or false (I'm sympathetic to it, others obviously are not) but I think it can't be ignored if you want to make sense of the Forge position.
At least as I read Forge ideas, and have applied them in my own gaming, a key premise is that RPGing involves collective generation of a shared imaginary space. Which then gives rise to the question "How do we create that shared imaginary space? And what are the criteria for introducing elements into it?" Certain ways of doing this are incompatible with others.
"Mainstream" RPGing of the Darths & Droids variety basically makes the GM the answer to this question. That relies on a certain social dynamic - about subordinatin of some participants' aesthetic preferences to those of others, often very forcefully asserted once words like "power game" and "munchkin" start getting hurled around - which is itself quite specific but I think also somewhat ubiquitous in mainstream RPGing.
Forge design is therefore, in part, about exploring how other social dynamics might be incorporated into RPGing to allow different approaches to building the shared imaginary space. Different mechanical and system techniques are then interesting not just in themselves, but as ways of doing this.
