Speaking of random enemies, what about ToME's wandering elites? They pick two player classes and get a smattering of abilities from each. It can be the worst, most disjointed pushover mess... or completely end you in a couple turns if you don't take a look at it beforehand. Unfortunately, far more of them were the former, so you were never prepared for the latter.
Its a roguelike. It being completely unfair and killing you because you weren't prepared 2 years in advance is fairly typical.
Then again this is ToME which as a whole has a huge feeling that it basically tries to avoid the typical ToME terribleness so anything that is fairly typically roguelike is felt even more.
Yes the Wandering Elites are a rather lazy feature. It easily could have been rectified had they put any real time and effort towards it... but I have a feeling their view of it is "Hey its a roguelike".
Hey did I ever tell you that I think Roguelikes are fun but the constant apologetic nature of the rogue-like community and developers holds back the entire genre and as such many roguelikes use the typical RL features like a crutch in place of genuinely fun and engaging gameplay or don't actually support those aspects well? I say this because my disdain is rather obvious.
Actually add that to my list
-Roguelike: Used to be a feature that I loved, honestly the first time I heard of a game where if you don't wear protection when picking up a poisonous orb, that you would get poisoned. I jumped on it. Heck the dying a lot didn't but me at first. Then however I started learning what you had to do to win those games and found out that for the most part Roguelikes is pretty much a garbage genre as a whole with a few notable exceptions. Even the exemplars like Nethack are just dreadful in how they expect you to play the game.
This, this, this. The most egregious example (well, besides ASCII idiots) being permadeath. There seem to be a few reasons this scrappy mechanic is still thought of as integral:
1) Excitement, usually one of the most cited ones. This is an inherently contradictory example because of its evil twin: frustration. Nobody likes just throwing away their hard work. The argument then goes that if there's little work invested in a character anyway, it's less frustrating. But obviously, then it's less exciting - I can only care so much for my ShIt generation IV being shot by a Centaur for the third time.
2) Replayability. Actually, given the constrained race and class combinations, skill aptitudes etc. it gives more replayability, but that's only because they're also pretty shitty mechanics. Permadeath does not inherently infer replayability, it's merely a requisite for having permadeath be palatable at all.
3) (Maybe more like 1b) It's somehow a requisite for complex thinking and strategy. Perhaps this is because of a feeling of disappointment with games where characters is stacked out with the best stats, armour, items, etc. This is a flaw of game design that is only slightly ameliorated by permadeath (and the cure is surely worse than the disease) as shown by the fact that it applies to roguelikes in the late-games, which also leads to roguelikes being easier later on, contrary to game design 101.