Overwriting an attribute in a subclass

There are a few ways to get all of your Dragons to be orange.

You could initiate Dragon with a keyword argument

The base class Monster takes keyword arguments. This bit of code in Monster.__init__():

    for key, value in kwargs.items():
        setattr(self, key, value)

takes any keyword argument and sets it as an attribute of the class after it runs the basic initialization and random color assigment. So you could simply instatiate your Dragon using:

    orangy_the_dragon = Dragon(color='orange')

You could write your own Dragon.__init__() method that overwrites the Monster.__init__ () method:

class Dragon(Monster):
    min_hit_points = 5
    max_hit_points = 10
    min_experience = 6
    max_experence = 10
    sound = "raaaaaaaaaaar"

    def __init__(self):
        self.hit_points = random.randint(self.min_hit_points, self.max_hit_points)
        self.experience = random.randint(self.min_experience, self.max_experience)
        color = 'orange'  # <-- hard set color
        # keep keyword argument parsing to allow overwriting color (if you tire of orange)
        for key, value in kwargs.items():
            setattr(self, key, value)

But this isn't very DRY: you're repeating code from the Monster base class

You could write your own Dragon.__init__() method that utilizes the Monster.__init__ () method:

class Dragon(Monster):
    min_hit_points = 5
    max_hit_points = 10
    min_experience = 6
    max_experence = 10
    sound = "raaaaaaaaaaar"

    def __init__(self, **kwargs):
        # call base class __init__()
        super(Dragon, self).__init__(**kwargs)
        color = 'orange'  # <-- hard set color

At Dragon instantiation, __init__() is called to initialize the new instance. If Dragon doesn't define it's own __init__(), Monster.__init__()' is called. As you found out, definingcoloras a base attribute ofDragongets overwritten byMonster.init()`.

Your suggestion of moving the random color assignment from Monster.__init__() to a Monster base attribute would have an undesired side effect: All monsters of the same subclass of Monster will have the same color since the color would be defined once, randomly, when the class is first parsed. Color would not be redefined each time a new instance is created unless the instance color is define using a keyword argument.