So. I'm going to start off my analyses of slimes in old-school D&D with the handful of slimes which appear in the monster listings of all those editions of D&D which can uncontroversially be called old-school: OD&D, B/X (I'll keep things focused on Moldvay, for simplicity's sake; in any case, as far as I know there are no appreciable differences in the slime monster entries between Holmes, Moldvay, and Mentzer, and even if there are - fuck it), BECMI/RC, and 1st Edition AD&D. And what better place to start amongst these than with the archetypal D&D slime: green slime!
Mechanically, green slime is broadly consistent across all four editions: a 2HD monster which cannot move or attack in the normal fashion, and can only be harmed by "fire or cold;" all other attacks do no damage (or, as OD&D somewhat strangely puts it: "it is not affected by lightning bolts or striking by weapons"). It dissolves any wood or metal it comes into contact with, but not stone, and if it comes into contact with flesh it sticks to it and turns that flesh into green slime in a handful of rounds. It can be burned off, and maybe scraped off depending on what edition you're reading.
The biggest discrepancies, mechanically speaking, between the different edition's iterations have to do with how long it takes green slime to dissolve things: OD&D doesn't specify; B/X says it takes six rounds to dissolve both wood and metal; the Rules Cyclopedia keeps the six round timeframe, but clarifies that the other main substances you'd expect to find on adventurers, cloth and leather, are dissolved "instantly;" and the 1e Monster Manual says it dissolves wood slowly, at the rate of "one inch thickness" in an hour, but dissolves metal quickly, "going through plate armor in just 3 melee rounds." With regard to that last one, it's not specified why this would be the case, and the only implied justification I can see is that the MM specifies that green slime is a plant, so maybe the idea was that it would eat through other plant matter more slowly. As long as we're wondering about that, though, we should probably go ahead and wonder why metal is relatively easily dissolved (incredibly easily, in the case of the MM), but stone isn't. There is, of course, an obvious mechanical justification, which is that if green slime dissolved stone there would be no place for it to sit in a dungeon, which is what you want it to do.
Because it's obvious from even just a cursory glance at any of these listings that the point of green slime is to be a dungeon hazard; it's really a trap or a trick, not a monster properly speaking. You don't "'fight" it, you have to deal with it more creatively, like you would with a pit that blocks an entire corridor. It's actually somewhat baffling that green slime is given a monster listing at all, instead of being detailed along with other traps and tricks; sure, D&D has its share of trick monsters, but even most of those are still engaged with like other monsters; there's just an added layer of some devastating surprise it pulls, and/or puzzling out how to defeat it. Green slime doesn't work like that, which I guess explains why, by the time we get to 3rd Edition, it's been moved out of the Monster Manual and into the "Dungeon Hazards" section of the DMG.
But where it belongs in the books is beside the point. So it's more of a hazard than a monster - fine, how does it work? Well, like any trap or trick, it depends on how the DM decides to use it. This is a good article which breaks down four different types of green slime, which is to say four different ways that the DM can make use of it; at least, that's what it's nominally about, but as the title suggests it's really a breakdown of the four different ways DMs can use traps in general. To briefly summarize, the options which the article presents for using green slime are:
1) Put it out in the open, covering an entire hallway or a door that the players need to get through. In this scenario, the green slime is a "puzzle-trap;" the players are presented with something they know is deadly blocking their way forward, and they have to figure out how to get past it.
2) Put it in a specific spot that the players have to actively look at to notice; if they don't, they get slimed. Here, the green slime fulfills what might be the most obvious purpose of traps: to punish the players for not paying sufficient attention to their environment.
3) Put it in a specific spot that the players will only notice if they pass a roll of some kind. So either you get slime on you or you don't, and if you did the problem becomes how you get rid of the slime. It's the classic "You've fallen into a pit with spikes all along the sides - now what?"
4) Put it on the ceiling where it will fall on whoever's first in the marching order and eat their armour. Pretty much just a tax for walking around a dungeon.
Now, the article makes clear that the first three are good and the last one is bad, and I tend to agree, but I don't really want to get into the nuances of what makes a good or bad trap. These may not even be the only four kinds of traps, although they do seem like they cover most of the bases. The point is really just to illustrate that there are actually a lot of interesting uses for green slime, but this only becomes apparent when you internalize that it's a trap, not a monster, and that you should be using in situations where you need the former and not the latter.
So that's the mechanics of green slime, but what kind of role does it play in terms of setting? I mentioned that the Monster Manual indicates that it's a plant growth, but that's actually the first time we're told anything about what green slime actually is; the closest we get is Moldvay telling us, helpfully, that "green slime looks like green, oozing slime." Until the MM, it's not at all clear where green slime comes from, or how it ends up appearing in dungeons: remember, as far as we know from its entries up to this point, green slime only spreads from contact with "flesh," which I guess we can assume means animal matter. The implication seems to be that anywhere there's a giant patch of green slime, there used to be a big group of cave spiders or something. It also doesn't seem that there's anything about this spreading that's intentional, even "intentional" in the way a venus flytrap attracting and subsequently eating a fly is; sometimes it drops onto living matter, and sometimes it's stepped on, but this all seems to be quite accidental.
Of course, as with any monster before we get to the "Gygaxian naturalism" of the 1st Edition MM, the intent seems to be not so much to give a reasonable "ecology" or explanation of how a monster ends up where it ends up and does the things that it does, but to fulfill a particular mechanical role and/or give off a general vibe. This vibe, as Zak S. has suggested, could be an attempt to suggest a kind of otherworldly, Erol Otus aesthetic of a Medieval Europe where, as Zak puts it, "sometimes things were radioactive green," but it's also worth remembering that it's probably at least partially based on a real thing, which surely must have seemed like some alien monstrosity to the people who first came across it.
The Monster Manual, by contrast, gives us a recognizable thing - still weird and a bit alien, but with a recognizable ecological role. It's a "plant growth," essentially a fungus or mold, which, we are told, slowly grows as it feeds on "animal, vegetable and metallic substances;" in other words, even when "flesh" isn't around, it's spreading by absorbing the zinc in the walls, or whatever. We are also told that it's "sensitive to vibrations, and will often drop upon passing creatures from above." There's the venus flytrap "intention" that was missing from the previous iterations.
Okay, so let's assume that we want a green slime that makes more sense than not, and we go with the MM's account of how it spreads itself. This is where things get really interesting, I think. Remember how I said that mechanically, the reason green slime doesn't dissolve stone is because we need it to be in the dungeon and the reason we need it to be in the dungeon is that it plays the role of dungeon hazard? Well, with the MM version, there's also another, setting-based reason we need green slime to stay in the dungeon: if it was sufficiently prevalent on the surface, the world would be a barren wasteland covered in green slime.
Now, you might have to accelerate the rate at which it dissolves wood to get that effect, but even if you don't, there are exciting setting possibilities built into the idea that green slime slowly spreads itself by converting into green slime anything it touches that isn't stone. Whole fields of green slime, stretching as far as the eye can see. An entire kingdom brought to its knees by the stuff, the survivors crammed together behind a city's stone walls, manned by ever-watchful guards armed with torches. Now, that radioactive green isn't just evocative of an otherworldly Medieval Europe, but the cartoonish, green-goo post-apocalypse of Gamma World or After the Bomb or something.
Of course, in this case the stuff loses its "trap" status entirely, and maybe doesn't play quite as interesting a mechanical role, but that might be a fair trade-off to be the catalyst for an entire setting.
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