How would a monk go about throwing a charging enemy?

Question

Everyone's seen that scene in king-fu movies, right? Someone charges the good-guy, and he flips him tail over teakettle. Sometimes the baddy in question gets tossed a foot or two, sometimes he gets tossed through a door.

What feat/class feature/rule/mcguffin would I need to do this? The rules for throwing other characters (player or otherwise) in general are kind of vague, and I can't seem to find anything that would let me do it, which seems kind of odd to me considering how much of a hallmark it is of the martial arts.

Answer 1

The Advanced Player's Guide and the Dragon Empires Primer have feats that expand rules for throwing other beings in combat.

The base feat is Ki Throw

On a successful unarmed trip attack against a target your size or smaller, you may throw the target prone in any square you threaten rather than its own square. This movement does not provoke attacks of opportunity, and you cannot throw the creature into a space occupied by other creatures.

Expanded by Improved Ki Throw

When using the Ki Throw feat, you may throw your target into any square you threaten that is occupied by another creature.

Further expanded in Dragon Empires Primer with Enhanced Ki Throw

When using the Ki Throw feat, you can expend 1 ki point to amplify the force of your attack. If your ki throw succeeds, when the target hits the ground, it takes damage as if you had hit it with an unarmed strike.

EDIT This answer applies to Pathfinder only. The 3.5 tag was added later.

Answer 2

The perfect answer for this in 3.5 is Counter Charge, a 1st-level maneuver from the Setting Sun discipline (Tome of Battle): as an immediate action, you can throw an enemy attempting to charge you. The throw is basically a Trip but you can use Str or Dex for the check and if successful, you can choose which square the foe lands prone in. Like any martial maneuver, this can be used once per encounter, unless you've got levels in an initiating base class amd have a way to recover them.

The best way to get Counter Charge is to be a Swordsage: they have native access to Setting Sun, and they make an excellent replacement for the very poor Monk class. However, Monk 2, perhaps with a couple levels of something else, is a pretty good dip for a Swordsage, and any Monk can multiclass into Swordsage and see immediate benefit. The Tome of Battle classes are very multiclass-friendly. Alternatively, the Martial Study feat can let anyone pick up Counter Charge. No recovery method that way and you burn a feat, but the Swordsage's recovery method is horrid anyway.

If you have access to both 3.5 and Pathfinder material, the Setting Sun school is also much better than the Ki Throw series of Pathfinder feats. The Swordsage is also far better-designed than the Pathfinder Monk (which is very similar, barring archetypes, to the 3.5 Monk), but there are some Monk-specific features in Pathfinder that makes multiclassing for a few Monk levels a better option than it is in 3.5. The Underfoot Adept Halfling Monk, in particular, is quite appropriate.