Solo boss encounters are a common thing that people want to do in D&D-likes, but the way the system is set up, they don't really work unless you mess with it.
This post is a description of how I mess with it to make them work better. It might not work at all for you or maybe it will be the most brilliant thing you've ever heard of. These ideas aren't new but also it's the result of mashing together decades of blogs and different RPGs and trying things out so I don't remember what the sources are.
So: Solo boss encounters. We're defining this to mean a challenging, interesting battle against a single combatant. There's lots of other ways to make a 'boss' encounter but I'm not talking about those here. The most common thing people try to make this work is to just use a higher level monster; this has various issues depending on system, but most often, makes for a frustrating experience because its AC is too high, its saves are too good, its damage is too high, or more than one of these things. Then the action economy doesn't let it actually do enough things to feel like an active fight, because these games aren't designed for a 1vX fight, they're designed for lots of things to be on the field on both sides, so it just stands there getting missed/making saves and then one-shotting people. Tonberry is a boss fight, all right, but it's not really the one that people are looking for most of the time.
The trick I use is basically, just duct tape a bunch of monsters together and make it a single monster, then invert the action economy.
Duct taping them together is relatively understandable; just mash them all up as if the party was facing multiple monsters. Inverting the action economy only takes a tiny bit more explanation. If the party was actually facing multiple monsters (let's say five ogres), then the enemy team would start out with five actions per round and go down to one action per round as the party dealt damage. This leads to a cleanup phase and an anti-climactic finish. Inverting the action economy means that the solo monster starts with one action per round, and as it takes damage, this increases until it's up to five actions per round.
For crowd control effects, obviously those have impacts on the action economy, and the answer like most answer is based on thinking 'what if it was five separate monsters'. For each unique CC effect that would prevent them from taking actions, they lose one turn. If they're paralyzed, they lose one of their turns each round; a second paralysis effect does nothing. If they're paralyzed and stunned, they lose two turns each round, but another paralysis or stun wouldn't make it any worse. This makes AoE CC less valuable against the duct taped version than it would be against the individual monsters, but because this lines up with the desired villain fantasy, that's all right, and it allows for CC to be useful against the boss encounter without ruining it.
You could probably figure out how I'd do this from what's written here already, but let's make an example monster instead. I'll use the Ogre (CR2) from D&D 5E as an example here because basically everyone knows how to read 5E statblocks and Ogre is an SRD monster. I'll start by going through each stat and describing what the effect of duct taping a bunch of them together (five, specifically, in this case) has on that stat.
Armor Class: Unchanged. Five ogres each have the same AC as one ogre.
Hit Points: Multiply by five; five ogres have five times as many hit points as one ogre.
Speed: Unchanged. Five ogres can move more often than one ogre, but not further, so speed changes are covered by action economy changes instead of altering the speed.
Ability Scores: Unchanged.
Senses, Languages, CR: Unchanged. However, for CR, of course when encounter building you should consider this to be a number of creatures equal to the number you duct taped together; five ogres is five CR 2 creatures. This means that the XP value listed in the statblock should be multiplied.
Actions: Unchanged. Just like speed, five ogres can attack more often than one ogre, but they don't do any more damage.
And then the only change needed outside the statblock is initiative/action economy. Check the number of hit points a single creature of this type has. Each time the monster loses that many hit points, it gets to take another turn in the round. One ogre has 59 hit points, so each time five ogres duct taped together loses 59 of its hit points, it gets to take another turn each round. (The five combined have 295 hit points, which sounds like a lot but is exactly as many hit points as you'd have to chew through to kill five ogres.) You can roll initiative for it multiple times if you want, but usually it's easier to assign fixed numbers that each turn occurs on; you can either count down or count up. Ogres are slow, so we'll have this one count up; they take their first turn on initiative 5, second on 10, third on 15, fourth on 20, and fifth on 25. It'll start out slow as the party expects, and then become blindingly fast and dangerous at the end.
Depending on the party and the monster, you might find that damage values are scaling fast enough that your monster isn't getting to access all of its turns because it's being blasted through HP lines. If this is happening, optionally, you can give them a bonus immediate turn right when the line gets passed. This is also a great time to do any sort of phase transition you might want to do; maybe the ogre lights its club on fire and the damage becomes fire when it gets up to taking three turns per round.
And that's all there is to it. Here's the statblock.
Five Ogres Duct Taped Together
Large giant, chaotic evil
Armor Class 11 (hide armor)
Hit Points 295 (35d10 + 105)
Speed 40 ft
Initiative: Five Ogres Duct Taped Together don't roll initiative; instead, they act at initiative 5. Each time FODTT loses 59 hit points, they can take one more turn each round, at an initiative count 5 higher than their highest current value (5, 10, 15, etc, up to 25 when they are down to 59 hit points or less). (If you rolled hit points for FODTT, this occurs each time they lose 1/5 of their maximum hit points.)
Str 19 (+4), Dex 8 (-1), Con 16 (+3), Int 5 (-3), Wis 7 (-2), Cha 7 (-2)
Senses Darkvision 60 ft, passive Perception 8
Challenge 2 (2,250 XP)
Actions
Greatclub. Melee Weapon Attack: +6 to hit, reach 5 ft, one target. Hit: 2d8+4 bludgeoning damage.
- Javelin (Melee). Melee Weapon Attack: +6 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: (2d6 + 4) piercing damage.
- Javelin (Ranged). Ranged Weapon Attack: +6 to hit, reach 30/120 ft., one target. Hit: (2d6 + 4) piercing damage.
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