See, yes. You -can- target a square. At which point you see the rules that tell you how to do so... and BAM you're targetting a creature as a part of that very system! The -rules for targetting a square- inform you that you are -in fact- targetting a creature as you do so.
Unless you're refering to some other rules for targetting a square that I haven't seen yet. Could you point those out?
Ok, so there's a textual rules issue here. However...
More Importantly:
The rules are written colloquially. Attempting to resolve this dispute by going through the text with an extraordinarily fine comb is like finding detail in a jpeg that's been enlarged until the screen is filled by part of one pixel. You're not seeing useful detail; you're seeing enlargement artifacts.
Take the text at
face value: it mentions targeting empty squares in passing and focuses on invisible foes. The rules are
blurry on everything else pertaining to this matter. They
don't say if you need a target in the first place, they
don't say what to do if your target isn't a creature, they
don't even say what happens to the "Effect" and "Miss" lines
at all if you miss an invisible creature entirely by virtue of picking the wrong square (miss: half-damage?!.. but he just teleported to another plane!). The rules
don't explicitly mention in which order the effects of an attack need to be resolved, even though there is
usually only one reasonable order (or the order doesn't matter). The rules
don't define what to do if one or more of the effects are impossible or nonsensical.
Most of these things have reasonable solutions - but those reasonable solutions might unfortunately be situational or subject to considerable table-variation. There are huge gaping holes in the "rules" if you consider them to be a precise spec. A DM needs to fill in those gaps with common sense, and fortunately it usually just doesn't matter or is obvious so the game will remain consistent without much effort.
Sometimes there is fuzziness that isn't obviously resolvable however, and then there's one clearly wrong way to try and resolve the imprecision:
Trying to reason about in-game results based on unintentional textual details is unlikely to make the game more playable.
It's clear what to do with "Effect:" and "Miss:" lines when part of (1) attacks against visible foes. It's less clear but still reasonable to do the same when part of (2) attacks against squares containing invisible foes. Even at this stage though, I could imagine a reasonable DM ruling that a miss-effect might occasionally not occur. It's even less clear what to do when used as part of (3) an attack targeting an empty square that the PC hoped would contain an invisible foe - presumably most reasonable DM's would not have the missed creature take any negative effects, but allow the PC to use unrelated benefits. And finally, it's unclear what to do in our case: (4) when the PC targets a square believed to be empty.
In the range of possibilities from (1) to (4), it'd be nice to have some consistency. But somewhere along that range, you almost certainly want "Miss:" and "Effect:" line effects that affect the target to stop working. Perhaps in step (3) - with the reasoning that you can't affect a creature at all if you get the square wrong? Perhaps in step (2) - with the reasoning that your target was the
square not the
creature and that thus the miss effect applies to the square (which is unaffected) and not the creature? Or perhaps it's power-dependent?
The point is, we're better of dealing with the fact that the situation is not clearly defined and making a
reasonable ruling than grasping at textual straws and risking an
unreasonable ruling.
So, if you believe that the effect
should not happen - you may have a fine argument. But if you believe that this comma on that page, when read in conjunction with this other sentence in another book and without reference to common sense mean that the rules
really say the effect does (not) happen - well, color me unconvinced. The rules say nothing of the sort since they don't much say
anything at this level of detail.
