Should I be taking these as arguments or define them in a sub class?

Question

So I am making a mario clone in pygame and I have a base class Character and two sub classes, Mario and Luigi. The methods that the Character class defines require a significant amount of attributes from a sub class (around 20) to be defined. For example, the initial y velocity of the Character instance must be defined. Should I be passing all these attributes to the Character class as parameters or should I just have them defined in the sub class (ie. Mario or Luigi)? Or what about a mix? My thinking is that since these properties are all required for a Character instance to have, that they should all be passed as parameters in the constructor of the class.

Here's some pseudo-code to demonstrate what I mean:

class Mario(Character):

    def __init__(self):
        Character.__init__(self, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, ... 20)

class Character:

    def __init__(self, var1, var2, var3, var4, var5, ... var20):
        pass

OR

class Mario(Character):

    def __init__(self):
        var1 = 1
        var2 = 2
        var3 = 3
        var4 = 4
        ...
        var20 = 20
        Character.__init__(self)

class Character:

    def __init__(self):
        pass

Answer 1

I would suggest defining your common properties in the base class and simply assign them as such in the constructor for your child class. I would also put sanity checks ensuring that your necessary properties are set before you can use a given character on your field/map.

You shouldn't need to pass all of the properties to the constructor as this will reduce clarity in your actual code... Seeing a constructor setting properties defined in the base is probably more clear, especially if they don't all need to be set, or if there are additional properties.