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Nope, because the variance comes in how groups of enemies behave, or the enemies themselves behaving turn by turn. You already have this sort of variance in Sil, with monsters moving about and using certain abilities, and I'm sure a huge amount that I've yet to see. By having variance in the turn by turn damage you end up obscuring these longer term variations. Or at least making them less relevant, and harder to plan around.
Too much randomness obscures tactics, in my opinion. It can have advantages, I do not deny, but it's negative impact can outweigh that. To me it feels like a heavy glove around the hand, buffering all contact with the cold metal it grasps.
Not exactly, because of how the mathematical spread works. You're just as likely to get an overpowering roll on your seventh hit as on your first. Simple example: consider an enemy with 4 HP, and you attack with a 1d3 weapon. Some quick fiddling in Excel shows that there is no chance of it being killed in 1 turn, 40% chance of it dying in 2 turns, 58% of 3 turns and 2% of 4 turns. Contrast with a flat 2 damage - 100% death in 2 turns. This is a very simplistic example, and larger spreads work differently, but I wanted to show that random damage system weigh towards longer time to kill an enemy with a set amount of HP, due to last blow overkill. In particular contrasted with a deterministic system where the player can optimise against overkill. And don't forget that the 2% figure shows up a fair amount across many battles, and gets overinflated in our human brains.
Of course there's all sorts of balance things tied into this as well, and with higher numbers it becomes less relevant. It's still an issue though, in particular with weak enemies now and then taking a long time to kill. What may be a rare chance of the rolls can be very frustrating when it happens. Sil is particularly vulnerable to this as it has a very low floor to damage, and the random armour makes even that floor uncertain.
Does not a flaw in a gem stand out more ugly than a flaw in glass? 
Of course I understand if it's not something you want. This comes down heavily to personal opinion. I have blogged before about my great distaste towards such random mechanics. Sil's combat is perhaps the worst I've seen for this pet peeve of mine in how the modifiers effects the dice rather than the end result, and the armour is random each turn rather than flat. Most roguelikes have modifiers that give +1 to overall damage instead of 50% chance of +1, which has the effect of providing more guarantees in combat. In Sil it seems the whole combat damage system is set up to maximise the thing I hate!
Heh, I know ADOM isn't great. It is a lot more reliable in combat than Sil, with many of those modifiers getting simplified immensely during play - in particular the damage dice on weapons get heavily outweighed by flat modifiers. Combat is mostly very predictable. But it still has a lot of bad design in combat, and in particular a lot of overly detailed systems that end up having very minor effects on play. If I praise ADOM it's because I've been playing it for many years and it's hard to forget your first love. You might feel the same about Angband. In contrast I've been scathing towards ADOM II for carrying on with this convoluted system (expanding it to more complex areas, even). I think a modern roguelike should be held to higher standards. We shouldn't just copy the imperfect designs of the past. Sil is excellent in this regards in many areas.
A better example for a large game with a complex but deterministic combat system is ToME4. It may not be too obvious from an outside look since it's heavy on stats, but when playing you can very reliably know your damage range against any enemy. There is very little numerical randomness most of the time. You can plan moves ahead with reliability, which is important with its cooldown system. There are still surprises in enemy AI, and risks you can take, but in general you feel much more in control of what's going on. Importantly this means that when you die you don't have an RNG to blame, just your own choice of actions.
Too much randomness obscures tactics, in my opinion. It can have advantages, I do not deny, but it's negative impact can outweigh that. To me it feels like a heavy glove around the hand, buffering all contact with the cold metal it grasps.
Also, you point to a creature that was no threat taking longer than average to kill, but couldn't it also take less time to kill, making it less boring? Doesn't it do that just as often?
Of course there's all sorts of balance things tied into this as well, and with higher numbers it becomes less relevant. It's still an issue though, in particular with weak enemies now and then taking a long time to kill. What may be a rare chance of the rolls can be very frustrating when it happens. Sil is particularly vulnerable to this as it has a very low floor to damage, and the random armour makes even that floor uncertain.
I think that can great, but I didn't want a system like that in Sil, and indeed very few medium or large roguelikes play that way. Most have pen and paper RPG style combat systems like Sil does. Most don't have loads of interesting tactical positioning abilities like Sil though. I don't see what Sil is doing worse than average here.
Of course I understand if it's not something you want. This comes down heavily to personal opinion. I have blogged before about my great distaste towards such random mechanics. Sil's combat is perhaps the worst I've seen for this pet peeve of mine in how the modifiers effects the dice rather than the end result, and the armour is random each turn rather than flat. Most roguelikes have modifiers that give +1 to overall damage instead of 50% chance of +1, which has the effect of providing more guarantees in combat. In Sil it seems the whole combat damage system is set up to maximise the thing I hate!
Especially if compared with a game that I know you love: ADOM, which has a more complex, more opaque, and probably less well designed combat system than Sil.
A better example for a large game with a complex but deterministic combat system is ToME4. It may not be too obvious from an outside look since it's heavy on stats, but when playing you can very reliably know your damage range against any enemy. There is very little numerical randomness most of the time. You can plan moves ahead with reliability, which is important with its cooldown system. There are still surprises in enemy AI, and risks you can take, but in general you feel much more in control of what's going on. Importantly this means that when you die you don't have an RNG to blame, just your own choice of actions.
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