What makes the two systems different even before you consider other rules is that in D&D, you get more powerful over time. Call of Cthulhu, you are doomed to eventually fall apart, losing Sanity as you go on.
Me? I’m a GURPS grognard.
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When the eldritch winds howl outside and the rats are a-scittering and a-scratching in the walls, and talk in the study turns to Call of Cthulhu, I feel like giving a shout-out to the seminal RPG’s original author, Sandy Petersen, who was also a very important player in ID Software’s Doom, thereby influencing two important contemporary artforms in very cool ways:
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IIRC, RuneQuest used metric.
[ETA: RQ also came out of the Chaosium stable, of course.]
I always thought the decimal currency was very out-of-setting. 1 gold piece = 10 silver pieces = 100 copper pieces? Come on, let’s have 1 Schmeldengulder = 14 Pfotlen = 84 Pfennige; the next duchy to the East uses the same Pfennige and Pfotlen, but they issue Ksaksgulder that are only 12 Pfotlen, while the principality to the North uses Schmeldengulder and Pfotlen, but they have bigger Pfennige that are 56 to a Schmeldengulder, which are a bit big for smaller purchases so you’ll also see half-Pfennige that are just a Pfennig someone’s cut in half with shears.
And if we’re weighing things in pounds, whose pounds are we talking about exactly, stranger? Klagenberg Elf pounds, or the rather smaller Difgental Goblin pounds?
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Some of the settings do have more specific currencies than the “generi-money” used in the base rules.
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I saw this the other day, and the revelation that CoC’s core demographic is Japanese women 17-35 makes me really curious as to what form the gameplay actually takes. Is it even played as horror?
It’s a game without a fixed time/place for its setting, the rules don’t dictate a particular way of playing it (and adapting/ignoring/modifying rules is standard with RPGs anyways), and revisionist takes on Lovecraft could mean the source material isn’t even seen as horror. Especially if Japanese anime and video game adaptations (I use the word very loosely here) of Lovecraft are any indication, as they seem to include more “cute” versions of his monsters and dating narratives than horror stories.
But there’s no reason to think it is. That’s how it’s played in the US, not necessarily Japan. For all I know, CoC is played in Japan as historical romance (with monsters).
Edit: It occurs to me that RPGs are very much like religion - the text takes a back seat to the lived, cultural experience of it. With RPGs, most people get introduced by playing it - so that play experience determines your expectations of what the game should be. Which then gets taken by the players and propagated out as they GM sessions and introduce new players to the game.
I also have to wonder how many Call of Cthulhu game supplements there are that were written in Japan and only exist there. There have to at least be some 3rd party books, and they’re going to be invisible to players outside Japan.
D&D came out in 1974. Decimalization happened in 1971.
D&D is American though, so decimalisation happened a lot earlier
If the Brexiters try to bring back LSD then I will give them a whole new meaning to metric martyr.
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Yes, SAN was an important addition to RPGs. Many newer games like the SF-Horror game Mothership include a similar idea. It really helps with role-playing characters who aren’t necessarily stable when things get hairy (like Bill Paxton’s Private Hudson from Aliens).
Just so you know, original CoC designer and likely brilliant brain in a can JUST completed a Call of Cthulhu 5e D&D book!!! It’s beautiful! Go to Petersengames 
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came here to say this.
This is the meat of it, there’s more competition for fantasy-themed RPGs. D&D is still big enough to appear as easter egg stuff in Goblin Slayer or whatever but the most popular TTRPGs are still the Japanese ones unless there was a recent big shakeup. There are dozens of fantasy TTRPGs and not many in other pulp genres, so you buy what you can find easily enough.
EDIT
Guess it became a top seller because of the popularity of some actual play stories there. There are a huge selection of published replays for CoC that are in a popular line.
It would be like if Critical Role, The Adevnture Zone, etc used CoC instead of D&D.
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