I must seem like a complete and total noob, but how do you?
In the upper right part of your screen there should be something like Ve:x | Fa:x. Ve is your vertex count and Fa is your face, or poly, count.
Thanks! 
A sword with 2000+ polys is that high?
Depends on how many of them are there because you put them there and how many are there because of subsurf or similar. (If you’re using subsurf, edit mode will show you how many faces are in the base mesh.)
For a bunch of smooth surfaces and lower subsurf levels, that’s probably a fair amount. For complex things or sculpted surfaces, it’s barely anything. For example, That spaceship thing I posted a while back has about 71,000 polys in the exterior scene (not counting the halo fields), with everything set to subsurf level 3, and about 15,000 on the main body of the ship (the medium blue parts). However, in edit mode, there are only 238 manipulatble faces on that body.
ETA: Reading another thread (the one about ‘polies’) I heard that that’s not actually an accurate number, and so I hit render on my 71,000 poly scene and wavoom, the render window says 318,000 polys. That also means that the body would be 476 cage polys; but only 238 of them are distinct :).
If you go here http://s168.photobucket.com/albums/u170/Iambattousai/3D%20modeling%20pics/?action=view¤t=blender2007-03-2616-09-50-35.jpg you will find a picture of it. No subsurf just a cube that’s been extruded and some cylinders that also have been extruded. Some holes cut out and a texture put on.
Ah, if you used CSG for the holes I can see why there might be a lot of faces, since the CSG ops in blender tend to be kinda messy and hard to work with.
This is the modeling forum, so no, 2000 is not high for detail and precision. For the Game Engine, it is over the top; a sword should have 10 max.
10? I was told 500 would be the max for a game. What do you mean CSG?
Um, it depends. If you’re making a sword that’s held by a random grunt that you want a lot of copies of, ten or thirty might be a decent target, because you’ll probably want the whole grunt to be less than five hundred and the sword is mostly a flat object that could have most of the work on it done with textures. If you’re going for a held-weapon model that a player would see filling half their screen sometimes, 300-500 just for it probably wouldn’t be too excessive, especially if it’s a particuarly ornate one.
CSG – when you said you cut holes out of the sword I figured you meant with a CSG subtract operation, deleteing the area of another mesh from the one you’re working on.
CSG is a great tool and all, and fundamental in other places like POV, but blender tends to suck at it when the objects are non-simple. Or so I’m told. I’ve only tested it out once or twice myself.
What would be a good way to reduce poly’s?
Hmmm, for some reason that INcreased my count.
I’ll fiddle around with it for a minute see what happens.
I try to avoid using the decimator as it butchers most models. I stick with deleting edge unnecessary edge loops (hold alt while right clicking on an edge, then press x and select edge loop)