You can have magic be systematic and explicable without it being something that spoils adventures.maglag wrote:But then you're making the whole player party premise irrelevant. You don't grab a sword/staff and go with your allies to explore the dangerous dungeon to slay the mighty dragon, instead you just get a bunch of hirelings to build up an army of killer mecha and nukes and bury the obsolete dragon inside their obsolete dungeon that has zero interest for you since you already attained ultimate power by finding the system's exploits whitout need of any pesky courage or adventuring.
There may be some sweet spot where there's a "universal magic engineering" system that's as equally as viable as adventuring, but unless you can dedicate centuries of real world time to fine-tune it, then the scales will inevitably shift towards one direction and make the other side irrelevant.
Take Eldrikinetics as an example from the Gramarie system itself. It's the magic of propulsion, both for vehicles and for projectiles. Thematically, a specialist in that builds magical vehicles that convey the party from destination to destination, and also has a big brass gun that launches spears through people. The actual implementation was fairly rubbish, but conceptually there's nothing wrong about an enchanter-style character who has a enchanted carriage and pea shooting blaster and who eventually levels up into having a flying machine and a much better blaster. They fact that your character uses the same skills to create a rail line from the Shire to Gondor in between adventures changes the setting, but it doesn't particularly invalidate the adventure part of it - it just means you're now doing the Eberron thing where 'a roc is decorating its nest with your stolen train car' is a valid adventure seed.
The basic core of that problem is one that a lot of D&D designers just never address. You have to figure out why your characters are going out and being adventurers and then make sure to never write in anything which solves that 'why' in a way that avoids the players doing some adventuring. That's not a difficult design constraint to work with, but for whatever reason it's one that many people fail to realize exists in the first place.