Continuing on with what I'm calling the "core" slimes of old-school D&D, i.e. slimes which appear in all the earlier editions of the game, let's turn our attention to the gray ooze.
Like green slime, gray ooze is relatively mechanically consistent across OD&D, B/X. BECMI/RC, and 1st Edition AD&D, with one particularly glaring exception that I'll come to in a bit. What we have, at core, a 3HD monster (3+3 in the 1st Edition Monster Manual) that resembles "wet stone" and is therefore difficult to notice in a dungeon environment. The Rules Cyclopedia adds that it can also appear to be like a small boulder, which the Monster Manual expands into the much broader "sedimentary cave formations;" in both cases, the idea seems to be to expand the ooze's camouflage "ability" to make sense in caverns as well as man-made dungeons. I say "ability" in quotes because, curiously, despite all four editions underlining this aspect of the gray ooze, none of them indicate that there is any explicit mechanical advantage related to it being hard to see: no bonuses to surprise or AC. Unlike green slime, it can be harmed by normal weapons, and is in fact the direct inverse of green slime in this regard: fire and cold explicitly do not harm it, while "normal weapons and lightning" do.
Gray ooze deals 2d8 damage, except in OD&D where it deals 2d6 (which actually makes it one of the most brutal OD&D monsters in terms of damage, where almost everything else does 1d6; even dragons do 1d6 when they're not using their breath weapons). This relatively high damage is the result of a corrosive property, either of an ooze secreted by the creature (explicitly stated in B/X and the RC), or of the ooze itself (implied in OD&D and the MM by the lack of mention of acidic secretions). This property also corrodes metal, though how this works varies quite a bit between editions. In both OD&D and the MM it corrodes "at the same rate that Black Pudding does," i.e. one melee round. In B/X normal armour is destroyed automatically, while magic armour takes a whopping one turn (so ten minutes). In the RC, magic armour (as well as magic weapons and items) also take one turn to be destroyed, but normal armour, weapons and items are, confusingly, first said to be destroyed in one round, but then said to be destroyed automatically if the black ooze hits its victim.
Which brings us to the somewhat ambiguous matter of how this damage and this armour destruction actually happens. In OD&D, there is no indication that gray ooze actually attacks; it is simply stated that the damage occurs "to exposed flesh for every turn [the ooze] is in contact with it." So it seems to function more like green slime in this regard, except that there's not even any mention that gray ooze sticks to flesh; it pretty much seems like the only way to be hurt by gray ooze is to be stupid enough to stick your hand in it. In B/X, it is made clear that gray ooze does, in fact, attack: "after the first hit," Moldvay writes, "the ooze will stick to its victim, automatically destroying any normal armour and doing 2d8 points of damage per round" (unlike with green slime, there are no rules for how to remove the gray ooze from oneself - presumably you just keep attacking it?). It is not made clear what the attack consists in - does it just touch its victims? Form a pseudopod? The same ambiguity remains in the RC. In the MM, it is specified that gray oozes "strike like snakes when attacking." There is no mention of the ooze sticking to flesh and doing damage per round, as in B/X and the RC.
Thus, gray ooze seems to begin life as another flavour of green slime, proceed through a couple iterations as a "normal" monster with an attack reminiscent of green slime, and finally become a fairly straightforward "ooze snake," distinguished from other monsters only by the fact that it corrodes metal and does an incredibly high amount of damage for a creature of its HD.
And I think this is the main thing to take away from gray ooze as a monster, mechanically speaking: in whatever iteration you want to talk about, it is way fucking overpowered for its hit dice.
So much for mechanics. Another thing that's inconsistent (or at least ambiguous) across the editions is: just what the hell kind of monster is a gray ooze, anyway? Like green slime, it's consistently presented as a "dungeon monster," insofar as it seems to only ever be found in underground complexes and caves. But after that, it's kind of a different beast (so to speak) depending on what version you're looking at.
OD& describes gray ooze as "a member of the clean-up crew and nuisance monster." It is most certainly not just a "nuisance monster," as I think my preceding analysis has made clear. I also don't know what the fuck "a member of the clean-up crew" is supposed to mean - I guess that it's a scavenger? It is also described as "a seeping horror," a phrase which appears verbatim in every edition's iteration except the MM entry, and is never adequately explained. My guess is that it's a needlessly ambiguous way of indicating that, unlike green slime, gray ooze can move around the dungeon, but it also could mean that it's only ever encountered bubbling up out of holes in the ground or cracks in the walls.
As noted, B/X makes clear that gray ooze attacks like a (somewhat) normal monster, but it's also the most minimally-presented version of the bunch: all we're told is that it's a "seeping horror," again, and that it "looks like wet stone and is difficult to see." Curiously, it's Number Appearing is given as "1 (1)", where the number in brackets indicates the number found in lairs or in the wilderness - which suggests that it actually can appear in the wilderness (green slime, by contrast, is given "1(0)"), though one wonders if the implications of this were thought through, given that it would hardly look like wet stone in the middle of a forest.
In the RC, we're given more specifics about what "looks like wet stone" means: "a patch about 8' in diameter." It's also the first iteration where gray oozes apparently come in packs; number appearing is 1d4, rather than 1. That's not particularly weird in itself, but we're also given this bizarre bit of information: "a lair may contain 1d4 oozes, possibly with a special treasure made of stone (DM's choice)".
What the fuck is that about? The RC lists the gray ooze's Intelligence as 0, meaning "unthinking." So how does it have the presence of mind to keep, not just treasure, but a "special treasure" made of a specific substance, which suggests that gray ooze recognizes, covets, and goes out of its way to obtain, objects with particular qualities. The effect ends up being rather unsettling: an apparently unintelligent creature that nonetheless exhibits intelligent behaviour. It's like if you discovered the weeds in your back garden were hoarding specifically-coloured rocks.
The MM gray ooze is, as mentioned, an "ooze snake;" it comes off the most like a recognizable predator, creeping around "subterranean places" looking for food, and this is an impression supported by the fact that it's Intelligence is now "Animal." It is no longer a "seeping horror" but a "slimy horror," which can get terrifyingly large: "large specimens (over 18 hit oints) are larger than a full grown man, some (those over 21 hit points) are fully 3' wide and 12' long although only about 6 or 8 inches thick." The 12-foot-long, 3-foot-wide ooze snake is only 8 inches thick, thank goodness!
But then we get this bit of insanity:
In exceptionally large individuals intelligence of a sort is well developed. Furthermore, these exceptional individuals have a latent psionic ability, and if psionic powers are used within 6" of them they will prepare a psychic crush of from 21 to 121 psionic strength attack points and direct it at any individual within range who uses psionic abilities. After loosing its psionic attack the gray ooze can be psionically attacked.
Two things:
1) The intelligence of a gray ooze is apparently a function of size. This suggests that, theoretically, a sufficiently large ooze could have a human level of intelligence, or more. Yes, the MM appears to give a size cap, but all you have to do is assume that there are occasional exceptions and you can have super-intelligent oozes running their own cities or whatever kind of weird shit you want to get into.
2) The MM as a whole by no means consistently correlates high intelligence with psychic ability, so it doesn't seem like what's going on here can be as simple as "more intelligent oozes have latent psychic abilities." My reading is that whatever gray ooze is actually made of has some sort of inherently psionic propety in sufficient quantities. Sounds like a potion-ingredient gathering quest waiting to happen!
Person opinion time. The first two iterations of gray ooze don't really do it for me; they're basically just a less-interesting, more ambiguously-detailed green slime with the added detriment (benefit?) of being a giant "go fuck yourself" to give your players on the third dungeon level. But the MM version of gray ooze doesn't really do it for me either; despite the fun possibilities suggested by hyper-intelligent psionic slime, a lot of what attracts me to slimes as monsters in the first place loses its appeal once you can understand the thing as not much different than any other dungeon predator - ickier, but basically just another thing wandering around looking for stuff to eat.
For my money, the most interesting version is in the RC. Imagine your PCs passing through several areas of a dungeon, fighting (or, more likely, running away from) gray oozes, assuming they're basically just a mobile version of the green slime they've also been seeing around, some kind of unintelligent dungeon fungus. At some point, they fight a group of them in a room or cavern where there also happen to be a couple large jade chunks of jade - they're not going to connect the two right away - they'll assume that the ooze and the jade just both happened to both be in the same room. It'll take a few more times of always encountering larger groups of gray oozes in rooms with jade rocks for things to click, and even then they won't be able to know for sure what's going on - because what are they going to do, ask the ooze?
How you'd make this work in the context of my proposed Slime World setting, I have no idea, but I'm nearing the length of a second-year college paper writing about fucking gray ooze, so maybe I'll stop here.
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