I'd be another to say Wings3D for starters. (It's the easiest one to pick up without other polygon modeling experience. If you understand the principles there, you should be good with stuff like Hexagon or Silo, or less similar programs even. Only thing is, Wings will probably spoil you from the modeling process perspective and make it hard to try stuff like Blender.)

As for Bryce, it can handle polygons really good as attested to by Rochr. But on some computers, it seems to choke a little on processing stuff on import. But this is because it's converting to tris, and that uses RAM. (Seems this step isn't too efficient in Bryce.) So I'd suggest to model and work with and keep things quads for the most part. But as that final step for any model going into Bryce (if it isn't something going to be rigged for DazStudio or Poser) would be to convert to tris. Importing tri based models is pretty near instanteous in Bryce.

---

Barbequed Pixels?

Your friendly neighborhood Wings3D nut.
Also feel free to browse my freebies at ShareCG.
There might be something worth downloading.